Democracy, as a system, is completely dependent on communication, to
the extent that when communication breaks down, so does the democratic
process. In order for a group of people to participate equally in
democracy, they must necessarily share a communication platform, where
they can share not just facts, but also views and opinions. Small wonder
then, that free speech is prized and cherished by all democracies, and
coveted by citizens of almost all countries that are yet to become
democracies.
One of the fundamental requirements of free speech
and participation in democracy is the availability of a free, open
medium and platform of communication that is equally accessible by all
members of the democratic community. Almost every culture in the world
has a concept of a central community gathering place, where people
gather after a day’s work, to talk and share information.
In India, this is typically the village chaupal, in West Kalimantan (erstwhile Borneo), Indonesia, it’s called a ruai. In Afghanistan, it may be called a chaikhana. These community structures have traditionally provided the common platform and free medium for communication.
This
type of platform is structured like a circle, and the free medium is
air. In a circular structure, everyone has an equal say, because
everyone has equal access to the medium and equal reach to every other
member of the platform. No special equipment is required to use this
medium; ears and a mouth will typically suffice. These structures
provided a way for people to voice their opinion, share their concerns
and find solutions to conflict through dialogue.
After the
industrial revolution and the dawn of the corporation, mass media began
to play this role in people’s lives. Newspapers, radio and television
became the new media that people used. These media had a much wider
reach and they seemed like the perfect democratic tool. However, these
media have a structural problem that prevents them from being truly
democratic. By virtue of corporate and editorial hierarchy, these media
are structured like a triangle (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Media communication
News,
in this model, travels downwards from an elite minority that determines
what content is “newsworthy” to the community. The community typically
cannot relate the incoming news to their own lives, and either becomes
disenfranchised by virtue of lack of representation, or assumes the
media version of facts to be true, and that they themselves are an
anomaly. At the very least, this influences their participation in
democracy, and at worst, they are rendered voiceless in that most
fundamental democratic process — debate.
This hierarchical model
of modern commercial media requires profits for the media organisation
to continue to run. This means that news needs to sell. If a newspaper
cannot generate advertising revenue, it will soon shut down. Obviously,
with profit as the first imperative, relevance of the content to the
community and their feedback must become secondary. Moreover, there is
an incentive in preventing communication technology from reaching its
true potential. For example, if community radio became fully
deregulated, would commercial radio or, for that matter, television,
stand a chance?
This skewed set of incentives, and the resulting
policies and actions, has led to several communities across the world,
particularly in the developing world, becoming alienated and
disenfranchised with mainstream society. These communities are
particularly susceptible to coercion and this might partly explain the
escalating violence in the world today.
This conundrum should be
quite familiar to open source enthusiasts, since the basic principles
involved are much the same as the ones in the open source vs closed
source software debate. To draw a parallel from The Cathedral And The Bazaar,
mainstream media follows the cathedral model, while community platforms
are more like bazaars. Both paradigms have their value and importance
in the structure of society at large. However, in the context of media,
the cathedral or top-down model appears to have reached its limits of
effectiveness — and, in my opinion, has passed the point of diminishing
returns.
The growth of user-generated content on the Internet over
the last decade is a clear indicator that as connectivity improves,
people are increasingly eager to directly voice their opinions and
concerns without the need of mainstream media as an intermediary,
particularly since in the real world, no intermediary is perfectly
impartial.
The developing world
In the developing world,
this uprising of citizen media has been stunted by the uneven
distribution of resources, such as infrastructure, connectivity and
literacy. While connectivity in the developed world has allowed the
blogosphere to become a political force to contend with, most developing
countries have an Internet penetration of less than 10 per cent,
typically concentrated in urban areas.
Even where connectivity
exists, the vast majority of users are only just starting to view the
Internet as anything more than email and instant messaging. In many of
these countries, even as economies have opened up and globalisation has
settled in, entire communities are still disconnected from the rest of
the world, primarily because they do not represent a market segment
worthy of media representation.
Mainstream media in these
countries typically focus on urban issues that relate to economic and
political decision makers, rather than the vox populi.
In several
of these countries, however, innovation is now taking place to bridge
this gap by other means. While Internet penetration remains low, the use
of mobile phones is a different story altogether. Most of the
developing world has far outpaced the developed world in terms of mobile
phone adoption and versatility of usage. Even in places where people
earn less than a dollar a day, cell phones are ubiquitous. A medium that
uses voice, the oldest mode of communication known to man, amplified by
several orders of magnitude, so as to cover unimaginable distances, is
as irresistible to a Gond tribal in Chhattisgarh, India, as it is to a
street food vendor in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Recognising the
potential of this medium, several groups are now actively engaged in
developing technology to allow people to use their voice to connect
themselves and their communities to the rest of the world. One of the
first tools of this new age of innovation is the audio portal.
An audio portal?
An
audio portal (Figure 2) is essentially a website with a lot of audio
content that can be accessed both through the Web as well as by phone.
Figure 2: An audio portal
While
the Web interface is usually like a blog, the phone interface is an IVR
(Interactive Voice Response) system, where users press keys to navigate
through menus and content. In more advanced IVR systems, voice
recognition may be used, though this is still limited to the
well-documented accents of the English language. The Web interface is
very similar to a blog, and several audio portals do use the blog
layout.
Behind the scenes, the platform will also provide an
interface to manage posts. Early implementations of audio portals tended
to rely on specialised moderation consoles, which have media-previewing
capabilities as well as functionality for moderators to add metadata,
such as a summary and title, to the content to make it friendlier to
users on the Web.
Users will typically call the IVR interface to
record and listen to content using their cell phones, while Web users
will access the website interface to listen to the audio posts using a
browser, and leave comments in text, which then may or may not be
converted to audio using a text-to-speech system.
People who own
the latest Android or iPhone may find the idea of an IVR interface to
browse content somewhat counter-intuitive, since it makes no sense to
call in and scroll through a set of menus, particularly with an
irritatingly monotonic voice rattling out instructions all the time,
when you can simply open the Web page on your cell phone’s browser, and
read.
The graph in Figure 3 may help clarify why a purely visual interface is not adequate to reach the majority of the world.
Figure 3: Cell phone and broadband users
The
percentage of Internet users, even among the mobile phone users of the
world, is a fraction of the percentage of people using their phones
purely for voice and SMS. While mobile Internet use is, and will
continue to be, on the rise, the bulk of the world will continue to be
on voice for some time to come.
This is also historically
consistent, since most societies have far stronger oral traditions than
written ones. Voice captures much more than simply language. Tone,
quality, emotion are all interwoven in the spoken word. If a picture is
worth a thousand written words, then a spoken word counts for at least a
few hundred… not to mention that drawing an attractive picture takes
considerably more skill than speaking!
What makes mobile phones
particularly attractive as a medium, though, is the two-way nature of
the medium. With radio and television, though the reach may be much
wider than mobile phones, the ability to respond immediately to what you
hear or see — on the same platform, at the same level as the source,
which is extremely valuable in fostering dialogue — is missing.
The
audio portal concept caters to every cell phone, whether mass-market or
smartphone equally, which works very well to level the platform. Most
importantly, audio portals use technology, skills and other resources
that are available now, as opposed to those that require extensive
“capacity building” exercises. This is probably the reason why audio
portals, as a tool, find more favour with grassroots workers and members
of the community, rather than with technology evangelists and academia.
The technology
Audio
portals utilise relatively simple technology, most of which has been
around in the open source world for some time. An audio portal will
typically consist of a phone interface (either fixed-line or mobile),
connected to a content-management system (usually a database) and a Web
front-end, via an IVR running on a soft switch or software PBX system.
Two examples of audio portal platforms are Swara and FreedomFone.
Swara
Swara
is an open source project, originally written as a research project by
students and professors at MIT to augment the outreach and activities of
CGNet, a people’s discussion group working with indigenous communities
in central India. CGNet was started by veteran journalist Shubhranshu
Choudhary, who returned to Central India, where he grew up, to find it
torn by violence. Probing to find the reason for the conflict, he
quickly realised that open, accessible community media would be a key
component of any solution to the conflict. Given that Internet
penetration in the region is less than 1 per cent, and community radio
is limited by regulation, the next best medium for a community platform
was the mobile phone.
The first pilot of Swara was deployed in
Bengaluru for use by indigenous communities in Chhattisgarh and
neighbouring states in February 2010. Today, the pilot receives over 300
calls a day, and the team is working on building the platform out as an
open source project for deployment in other locations. The first
replica of the project went live in Indonesia in December 2011.
Swara
uses a combination of the Asterisk PBX system in combination with the
LoudBlog audio blogging platform, with the integration written in
Python. The tested interfaces are GSM gateways (Topex Mobilink, etc) and
fixed lines (PRI/BRI) using a Digium telephony card.
FreedomFone
FreedomFone
was developed by Alberto Escudero Pascual and Louise Berthilson of
IT46, a Swedish IT consultancy, for the Kubatana Trust in Zimbabwe. It
was created for many of the same reasons as Swara was developed in
India, i.e., lack of impartial and open commercial media, and the need
for local and community-level reporting. The FreedomFone pilot, a weekly
audio magazine called Inzwa, has been running in Zimbabwe since July
2009, and received over 2,500 calls between July and September 2009.
FreedomFone’s team is also working on developing the platform as a
user-friendly DIY IVR kit, and is keen on replicating the model in other
areas.
FreedomFone uses the FreeSWITCH soft switch to interface
with telephony devices such as the Mobigater and Office Router GSM
gateways. The content management system is written in CakePHP, and
FreedomFone additionally uses the Cepstral speech synthesis system for
text-to-speech conversions. The stated objective is to create a purely
phone-accessible platform.
Deployment 101
Both platforms
have an almost identical design, as would most audio portal software.
This is almost analogous to how traditional websites are built, with the
choice of platform being similar to the choice between different Web
frameworks. Just as you will find lots of different opinions and
preferences for Web platforms among Web designers, you will find that
the few implementers of audio portals are just as varied in their
preferences for platforms. This usually depends on which platform the
implementer is most familiar with — and if you are implementing your
own, one is essentially as good as the other.
The key question,
irrespective of which platform you use, is one of deployment strategy.
At present, most implementations of audio portals as community media
platforms are centralised instances deployed by a single organisation or
group, with a specific agenda (such as news, healthcare or governance).
Centralised function-oriented deployment
Centralised,
function-oriented deployments require content of a certain quality and,
as a result, must usually be moderated. Speech-recognition technology,
particularly in the area of automatic transcription, is still a far cry
from being very accurate. As a result, moderating a function-specific
audio portal is still a manual job, for the most part.
Typically,
audio portal moderators will need to listen to each message and
summarise and/or transcribe it. Beyond transcription, there may be more
work to do to improve the quality of the content for the specific
purpose of the deployment, like sound quality clean-ups and edits, fact
verification (if journalism is the function, for example) and
categorisation. All of this work is further exacerbated in a centralised
deployment, since all incoming calls come to the same central hub (see
Figure 4).
Figure 4: Centralised deployments
In
India, and other countries where long-distance call charges are higher
than local call charges, centralised platforms also suffer from an added
cost element, since all callers must call the central number,
regardless of their own locations.
Hyperlocal deployments
An
alternative model is a hyperlocal community-oriented one. In this
model, an instance of the platform is deployed at the community level
and maintained by community members. Such community-level audio portals
could be used as voice-based bulletin boards. By managing the size of
the user base, and ensuring a manageable user adoption rate by limiting
publicity to word of mouth, communities could eliminate the need for
moderation by making sure everyone on the platform was known by the
others and therefore accountable to the community.
Several
communities can then choose to link their platforms, either by sharing
content, or by simply listening to each other. This will eventually lead
to an organically expanding network, where people can choose which
deployments they want to subscribe to, much in the same way as Internet
users subscribe to different forums and websites. This would also ease
the burden on centralised deployments already in existence, since they
could then simply trawl the community bulletin boards for usable
content, rather than filter out unusable content on their own incoming
stream. As you can see from Figure 5, the hyperlocal model offers more
avenues for collaboration and the cross-fertilisation of ideas between
communities than the centralised model.
Figure 5: The advantage of hyperlocal deployments
A
word of caution: This approach is still experimental, and needs several
more deployments before it can be considered a best practice. However,
for communities interested in improving their information access and
level of participation in mainstream society, this is a very worthwhile
experiment to take on. Both systems described here can be installed on a
mid-range notebook computer.
The software is all open source and
free for non-commercial use. Mobile interfaces like GSM gateways and
mobile ATAs are relatively cheap — a Matrix SETU ATA 211G would cost
roughly US$ 120, and the Mobigater is priced at about US$ 50. The total
cost of setting up a local IVR installation and running it through a
year, including the cost of connectivity, is typically less than US$ 200
a year.
Of course, the most important thing to remember while
setting up an alternative communication platform is that while
technology will certainly provide the tools, the key to success is to
build a strong community around your platform, and quickly demonstrate
value to the community from participating. This is where most of the
hard work lies.
It would be interesting to see how well the open
source community in India takes to these projects and how quickly the
hyperlocal model can be tested with several more installations.
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