Callback.io: Breaking community participation barriers facing community radio

Radio Amani based in Nakuru,Kenya is a community based radio station. Nakuru was one of the towns mostly affected by the post election crisis in 2008. Being the capital of a region that is not only diverse but the agricultural capital of the country, this town if fundamental in the development of the entire country.

The station christened ‘Amani’ which means peace in Swahili, was started to promote peaceful coexistence and reconciliation in the volatile region. Testament to this is the current ICC proceedings facing radio journalist Joshua Arap Sang in the Hague. The journalist is facing charges of inciting members of a certain community to pick up arms and kick out the so called non-natives. Then he worked as a radio journalist at one of the mainstream stations that is vernacular. Kass FM is very popular with part of the population, broadcasting in the Kalenjin dialect. Kass FM is owned by a leading politician and given the journalist is co -accused with another leading Kalenjin politician shows its level of impartiality.

Radio Amani has grown tremendously since being established in 2009. Since then their studio has provided the platform for peace building initiatives and bring about public participation around ethnic diversity. The radio has some full time staff while some are part time. Most of their shows allow for call ins from the community, engaging them around specific social topics.

Their Infrastructure

The Communications Commission of Kenya has really been hailed as a model authority in regulation of frequencies. Community radio stations are greatly subsidised. A license for a community radio station is about 15,000/= Kenya shillings annually which translates to less than 150$ as opposed to a commercial national licence translating to around 10,000 USD. The program manager does agree that the license fee to them does not worry them. The fee is totally within their reach in management of the station.
The studio is based in Nakuru while their transmitter is on Karbanet Hill. They use a satellite microwave link at the station to send signals to the hill where their transmitter is at a frequency of 88.3 Mhz.
At the studio, they have a desktop computer connected to the transmitter. Though they use media players, their music is archived in form of folders and files. Very little metadata is attached to the audio stored in the computer. The studio also has the standard studio microphone and a mixer. The mixer comes in handy especially when they host guests in the station and have microphones connected to the setup.
At the moment, they have provided mobile phone numbers which the audience can call in and also get SMS. The phones sit in the studio and the DJ’s have to read out the SMS’s or pick up the phone calls on air through their mobile phones. They do not provide for calling back their audience, or only do so when competitions are held and are informing the winners of their newly found win. They did have a technician install FrontlineSMS:Radio but realised it only handles SMS and were looking for more than SMS. Though it did provide useful in storing of SMS’s that come into the android phone that was attached. Some DJ’s still use the Frontline SMS interface for a better SMS reading experience. Juggling the mixer,the microphone,the phone and using the computer could at times become tricky for the older generation presenters.
The station also has a social media presence and are able to engage some of their participants using social media. This is through their

Next Steps

The main aim is to increase community participation by facilitating callbacks. That is having the studio queue callers and call them back. This helps in saving the community in participation costs. A typical phone call to the station would cost ten shillings per minute. Having a conversation especially around such sensitive issues could perhaps take long hence the need to being the cost down.
The station has postpaid lines where call rates are substantially cheaper. There has been conversation around co-sharing of the cost between the caller and the recipient but the mobile networks are yet to provide this in terms of their billing systems.
To help them have callbacks, these are the steps I propose taking to getting a product around the callback issue.

Week One

This week the activities will focus on finding out more on the technologies and options available. These activities include:

Call forwarding and callback software available
Investigate VoIP platforms and what happens when there is not internet for VoIP
Call records management

Week Two

This week will mainly focus on the proposed solution and the technical aspects in solving the problem.
This week

Software Architecture and specification
Initial setup of similar scenario for testing purposes
Working on the software call gateway: No matter how or angle we look at the problem, there will be need to set up a gateway, whether using a cloud service or setting up a local install providing the gateway
Feedback from industry experts. Send the proposal to several community radio participants and incorporate their feedback.

Week Three

This week will work on the call record management functionality. This is vital to enable callbacks during the show and will form the base of the application.

Call record management: Callback requests,call back requests made,
Voice mail management: This is mainly a desktop client/web toolkit to enable the users view their voice mail and get the chance to preview it before playing it on air. This provides for self filtering and check for calls that are not ideal for broadcast.

Week Four

This week will mainly involve doing a deployment and testing. Several options exist. One option would be to set up a webradio for the MIT Media Lab Community. Another would be to use the MIT radio station for testing purposes.

Deployment and testing
Documentation

These activities are not in any way final but provide a basis for the basic on what need to be done to achieve the project goals.