RootIO: ICT + telephony for grassroots radio

Abstract

Communities across Africa depend on radio for access to information, often as their primary source of news and information. Given its importance, surprisingly little ICT work has focused on improving radio. Contemporary ICTs have the potential to catalyze radical changes in ownership models, facilitate greater linguistic and cultural diversity, increase inclusion, and allow for the types of major innovations we have seen in music, television, gaming, or other media in the last decade. The RootIO project set out to test some of these possibilities by building hyperlocal low-cost, low-power radio stations. This paper presents an argument for community media as a focus of ICT, a summary of our research and design process, a technical description of the free/open software and hardware platform we have built, and a description of some early findings from field testing the system.