Community Media

Children's PressLine is a youth journalism program that trains kids,
ages 8 to 18, how to conduct peer-to-peer interviews on issues that
directly affect young people using a process of oral journalism. CPL’s
programs amplify the voices of children and teens – which make up 26%
of the population – into the mainstream media, building better citizens
and allowing young people to represent themselves on important issues.
The work is read locally in the Amsterdam News, syndicated to 400
Scripps Howard newspapers, and translated into Dutch for Ted Express in
Holland. CPL will soon launch a one-year, NYC-focused study to
determine the effects of youth media participation on the civic
engagement of youth media makers.

Media Policy Blog.org is a media reform forum created to increase
citizen awareness of media policy issues. The blog profiles
organizations and projects that promote the freedom of speech, a
diversity of ideas and policies to ensure public access to the media.
This is a project of Cambridge Community Television and the Center for
Media & Democracy.

Overview

We
are a nation whereby the overwhelming majority gets its information
from television and radio. The media shapes our opinions about
ourselves and others; it informs our actions and inactions. A diverse
and independent media is vital to the well being of any democratic
society. As technology prompts the evolution of the media landscape,
it is imperative that we assess its specific impact on our public media.

Unlike
efforts in some other countries, the United States has lacked an open,
deliberative process to determine our public media needs and how to
meet them effectively. On May 3, 2005, the Center for Digital
Democracy convened a participatory caucus to begin a series of
dialogues to address this issue. The caucus was held at the Ninth
Street Independent Film Center in San Francisco, California.

The
aim was to begin outlining what public media should be in the United
States and how we, the independent media community, can help make it
so. Scheduled to coincide with INPUT, the annual International Public
Television conference for independent producers and television
professionals, this particular meeting was the first of what is to be a
series of meetings designed to engage the independent media community,
media activists, public and private institutions, elected officials,
and the public at-large in developing strategies and tactics to ensure
a vibrant public media ecology.

The
three-hour caucus was attended by over 70 individuals representing a
broad cross-section of the field of independent media, including
television and radio producers; film, video and radio distributors
(broadcast, cable, satellite, festival, and educational markets);
independent media membership organizations; foundation and government
funders; private donors; members of the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting’s Minority Consortia; media librarians and archivists;
educators; media activists; and a representative of the United
Kingdom’s Office of Communications.

The
caucus began with brief overviews of public media from the perspective
of four panelists followed by a question and answer segment. The group
then broke into smaller working groups facilitated by the panelists to
outline needs and identify strategies and tactics. Finally, reconvened
as a whole, the small groups reported-out their key points. This
document consolidates that information and outlines specific action
steps and recommendations for moving forward.

What this document is…

The
information described below is by no means definitive. It offers facts
and opinions, suggested strategies, recommendations, and opportunities
for further exploration. The report-outs from the working groups are
ideas-in-formation requiring research, documentation, and discussion
before any implementation can be considered. The frequent use of the
term “we” generally applies to members of the field of independent
media, although the term, on occasion, refers to “we as a society.”

While
primarily a record of the caucus, this document does offer a degree of
context and analysis from the author and works to provide a framework
for engaging the field of independent media around the issue of public
media.

What this document is not…

This
is not a strategy document, although there are many seeds of ideas that
can be formulated into strategies for establishing a well-governed,
sustainable, and accountable U.S. public media sector that serves the
needs of our nation.

Several groups have called upon Congress to enact, or
the FCC to adopt, an enforceable “Net Neutrality” rule
to ensure the Internet remains open and accessible to all. Not
surprisingly, the network owners object, arguing that such a policy
is unnecessary and will delay their deployment of broadband
technologies.

This paper analyzes the Net Neutrality debate in more detail. The
paper is divided into four parts:

Part I is a reference guide on the Net Neutrality issue. It reviews
the rights at stake, describes the terms used in the debate,
provides a brief legal history of broadband network regulation,
summarizes the positions of the parties, describes documented
examples of discrimination or blocking, and includes matrices that
compare the differences among parties and proposals for action.

Part II makes the case in favor of a Network Neutrality rule. It
describes the enormous societal and economic benefits of keeping the
broadband Internet network open to all users. Broadband networks are
fast becoming the essential lifeline of our economy and society,
carrying on-line commercial transactions, current events, local and
national advertising, telemedicine and distance learning, music and
entertainment, interactive games, and videoconferencing. Allowing
the increasingly concentrated cable and telephone industries to have
unchecked control over our access to these sources of information,
entertainment and commerce is cause for great concern.

Net Neutrality is also important for our high-tech manufacturing
industry. Billions of dollars are invested every year at the
“edge” of the network by the high-tech computing
industry, the on-line commerce industry, the gaming industry, the
news and information industry, and the research community. A
statutory Net Neutrality rule will give investors the confidence to
support new, innovative applications. On the other hand, giving
network operators the potential to block competing applications from
getting on the network may be enough to frighten investors away from
otherwise worthy new Internet applications.

In short, open broadband networks are vitally important to our
society, our future economic growth, our high-tech manufacturing
sector, and our First Amendment rights to information free of
censorship or control. Even if an openness policy imposes some
slight burden on network operators, these microeconomic concerns
pale in comparison to the macroeconomic benefits to the society and
economy at large of maintaining an open Internet.

Part III responds to four arguments against Net Neutrality raised by
the network operators:

1. Network operators allege that Net Neutrality is a
   “solution in search of a problem” because there is
   only one documented case of blocking. In fact, network operators
   have already engaged in at least 8 known cases of blocking in
   the U.S. and are likely to block or interfere with more traffic
   in the future. Network operators have incentives to leverage
   their control over the network to reap additional profits in
   upstream markets.

2. Network operators allege that Net Neutrality will interfere with
   their ability to manage their networks, for instance, to prevent
   spam, viruses and congestion. In fact, there is no reason to
   believe that a simple non-discrimination policy should interfere
   with the operators’ network management responsibilities.
   Telephone companies have always managed their networks to
   protect against unlawful use even under a much more onerous
   common carriage regime.

3. Network operators allege that Net Neutrality will interfere with
   their ability to earn a return on their broadband investment and
   that it will stifle their deployment of broadband networks. In
   fact, Net Neutrality promotes broadband deployment because it
   increases the value of services and applications over the
   Internet, which increases consumer demand for broadband
   networks. The greater the demand, the more network operators
   will invest in broadband to meet it. Furthermore, there remain
   many opportunities for network operators to profit from their
   broadband investment that do not involve blocking or
   discrimination. For instance, network operators can continue to
   develop their own content and/or enter joint marketing
   arrangements or other promotional arrangements with other
   content providers.

4. Network operators maintain that Net Neutrality will prevent them
   from creating “tiers” of service, or a
   “private Internet.” In fact, Net Neutrality does not
   necessarily prevent network operators from offering levels of
   access, at higher rates, as long as the tier is offered on a
   nondiscriminatory basis to every provider and as long as all
   broadband customers are offered a minimum level of broadband
   service. A Net Neutrality principle does, however, prohibit the
   creation of a “private Internet” that grants
   exclusive access to the higher bandwidth levels to certain
   providers selected by the network operator.

Part IV provides an outline of a possible Net Neutrality rule or
statute. Net Neutrality does not require detailed rules that require
network operators to obtain government pre-approval to manage their
networks. Network Neutrality can be enforced through a simple
complaint process, as long as the network operator bears the burden
of demonstrating that any interference with traffic is necessary.

New report for the Center for Social Media's Future of Public Media Project (funded by the Ford Foundation).

Noelle McAfee reports from an October 2005 meeting held at the Charles
F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio were participants outlines a
strategy for future research on ways in which local publics and local
media might best work together to engage citizens in the civic life of
their community. This research is related to the larger question of how
those individuals and organizations in public media (and any media with
a public mission) best understand their own practices and relationship
to the public.

New report from the Center for Social Media's Future of Public Media project (funded by the Ford Foundation):

Digital Media and the Public Sphere
Barbara Abrash reports on a January12-13, 2006 convening of public broadcasters, digital media practitioners, scholars, funders, analysts and policy specialists, held at the Charles F.
Kettering Foundation. New citizen media are, in some bold experiments,
creating strong and vibrant public spaces, the very kind of public
spaces that traditional public media has long sought to foster and
nurture. At the same time, some public broadcasters are experimenting
creatively with more open and participatory environments.

IFEX circulates alerts on free expression violations, publishes a weekly roundup of global trends in press freedom and media development, and facilitates joint campaigns between member groups. The IFEX website hosts the largest online archive of free expression alerts, dating from 1995 to the present day.

Hipatia thinks that The Other World is a world where an ethical option for spreading knowledge and power is made.
According to what we believe, we propose ethical choices for the
Information Technology infrastructure of the WSF:
* databases
* software
* web sites
* Internet communication tools.

Free Software keeps communications alive at the WSF The Media Center at
WSF 2004, equipped with a complete network lab of 120 computers and 40
lap-top connections was maintained open and functional 24 hrs for the
entire forum with FREE SOFTWARE!!!

Key documents from the Geneva prep phases, regional conferences and summit. This link includes Principles, Action Plans & Final Reports, as well as background materials organized thematically (see related link).