For a recent Civic Media Lunch, we welcomed the co-founder and radio coordinator from ZUMIX, Madeleine Steczynski and Elena Botkin-Levy. ZUMIX is a twenty-year-old East Boston-based nonprofit that builds community through music and the arts. Their core constituency is low-income youth -- picture a Boys and Girls Club filled with kids playing guitars and learning to use mixing boards...

In its 2008 report entitled “Fighting Poverty: Utilizing Community Media in a Digital Age,” the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters features a piece by Bruce Girard, a community based media expert. His essay, “Community Radio, New Technologies and Policy,” lays out a brief history of community radio in relation to its growth over time thanks to both technological and policy based advancements. He laments the fact, however, that at the time of publishing, community radio stations across the globe were not doing enough to take advantage of significant innovation and interest within the ICT (information communication technology) world. The essay concludes with a number of recommended policies that will help community radio grow and help surrounding communities flourish via technology.

Here at the Center for Future Civic Media, we try to be careful not to be technological determinists when brainstorming ideas for new technologies that can foster civic engagement. Most students remain wary of thinking that a well-designed device will promote participation, no matter what. Instead, our discussions emphasize the need to keep the social mores and everyday practices of a community in mind, so that the tools we design are culturally sensitive, and thus more likely to be deployed.

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to Revi Sterling, a Microsoft Research Fellow who designed Advancement through Interactive Radio (AIR), a Digital Inclusion initiative of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Sterling’s work serves as a good model of a project that has been tailored to accommodate for cultural practices and on-the-ground realities in her test community in Southeast Kenya.