Archive for the 'Rural communication' Category
New friends from MakeSense
Two young guys from France, Christian and Romain, visited us a few days back. They are starting an organization, MakeSense, to link people for social businesses. And so they are currently touring and visiting all sorts of social entrepreneurial organization in Africa and Asia. Here’s what they said about us:
“Three guys in a little room [...]
IT for broadening education in India
Yesterday was a very interesting day. The President of Germany, Horst Kohler, and the Indian Minister of Science and Technology, Prithviraj Chavan, inaugurated the Indo-German Max Plank Center on Computer Science at IIT Delhi. The Center has been set up with the goal of deepening a research collaboration between Indian and German computer scientists. The [...]
Read More..>>Co-casting: An approach to enable participatory information systems in rural areas
Gram Vaani has developed a new concept called co-casting, short for community casting or contextual casting or cooperative casting — a new paradigm for communication in rural areas which is centered around specific communities that share a common informational interest. Co-casting is different from community radio broadcasting in the way it defines a community. Communities [...]
Read More..>>Gram Vaani elevator pitch
The ETNow business channel is running a feature called “Starting Up” where they focus on startup companies and get feedback from different VCs. They covered Gram Vaani last week and took our pitch to Sanjeev Agarwal of Helion Ventures. Not too bad! Thanks Charitra and team for the fabulous effort!
Read More..>>Using GRINS to Improve Technology and Processes at Community Radio Stations
[pdf] link to detailed report.
Radio Bundelkhand, one of the early community radio stations in India, started live transmission in October 2008. We visited the station in February 2009 as a part of Community Radio India Forum annual body meeting. During this visit we initiated talks of piloting the radio automation system being developed by us. [...]
GRINS piloted at Radio Bundelkhand
Gram Vaani successfully launched its first pilot a few days back with Radio Bundelkhand! Radio Bundelkhand is a community radio station operating in the small town of Orchha in Madhya Pradesh (India), and was the first community driven CR station to start broadcasting after the new policy. It is being run by Development [...]
Read More..>>Robust, Low-Cost Internet Service for Rural Areas
Internet penetration in rural areas, especially in developing countries such as India, is generally poor. Telecom companies do not find it economically viable to deploy wired broadband such as DSL; satellite connectivity is expensive and often slow; dial-up (if available) is always flaky; and cellular data services such as GPRS or EDGE are quite costly [...]
Read More..>>GRINS v0.1 is now out!
GRINS stands for the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System, Gram Vaani’s broadcast platform for community radio stations. We are very happy to announce that the first release is now available! You can download and use it free of cost. An open-source release will also be available in just a few weeks.
GRINS is an enhanced automation [...]
Technological Design Decisions Behind the Radio Platform
This is a post more for the technology minded, but even others should find it interesting to get an inside view of what goes into designing appropriate technological systems in rural contexts that we are addressing. We’ve made many design decisions along the way, based on our prior experiences, foresight into expected problems, and observations [...]
Read More..>>The community radio movement in India
India has been quite a latecomer to this promising channel of people empowerment through community media. Until late 2006, only educational institutions were allowed to set up campus radio stations having a transmission range of 10-15km. The scope was only recently expanded to also include non-profit agencies, agricultural research institutes, and schools, to set up [...]
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