Co-casting manual

Contents

• 1. What is co-casting
• 2. How is co-casting different from broadcasting
• 3. Networked co-casting
• 4. Who should do co-casting and why
• 5. Co-casting in India
• 6. Setting up a co-casting network
•      6.1. Planning
•      6.2. Technology
•      6.3. Processes for staff and volunteers
•      6.4. Funding
• 7. Running a co-casting network

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1. What is co-casting

Co-casting stands 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. For example, consider communities of farmers in a village, or nurses and midwives, or youth, entrepreneurs, etc. Each of these communities have different and very specific information needs. Co-casting places each community at the center and helps them cooperatively develop their own local communication network to create and share digital content specific to their needs.

As shown in the figure below, co-casting for health requires an NGO to set up a GRINS box in the community they cater to. Phone lines can be attached to the box so that community members can call and leave questions, or conference to interact with experts and local mediators. These local mediators can be selected from among more experienced community members. The box can even to connected to a television set so that educational videos made locally and offloaded on to the box and can be played out to listener groups during scheduled sittings together with an expert or mediator.

But note that co-casting is not just technology. The people and process are more important. Co-casting advocates that experts and mediators should interact with their communities not only over phone or by sharing videos, but even in person, to be able to attach themselves more closely to the local context and help members internalize the information effectively. Thus, co-casting is centered around three principles:

• Communities of interest
• Cooperation between community members: experts, mediators, people
• Contextual information sharing

 
But why is a local communication medium necessary, you may ask. To answer this, consider Sarita, a villager in Orchha, Madhya Pradesh India, who suffers from frequent eye infections and loses daily wages because of this. She has been told that washing hands will prevent infections, but she does not internalize this. A 5 minute video clip, however, that shows in graphic detail that infections arise from unwashed hands, and proper handwashing techniques, can change her world. But this clip cannot come from the outside world that she distrusts. If it features a doctor from the local hospital who speaks in her dialect, or even a friend, the message has more content and weight. This is the power of co-casting. It encourages contextual content production and consumption, which helps members internalize information more effectively than other means.

2. How is co-casting different from broadcasting

In the traditional broadcasting paradigm, a single communication network is expected to cater to all interests. Co-casting instead advocates different communication networks run by independent agencies. Although broadcasting through community radio and video networks has been the traditional norm, there are problems with this model as shown in the figure below:

• Community engagement: Community engagement is supposed to be the responsibility of the radio or media station, but this is not scalable because of the wide diversity of interests on the ground. A single agency cannot be expected to understand each of their needs or requirements.
• Program production: Although the expertise for content production lies with the community media center, but domain knowledge lies with the experts. Engaging external experts in program production again increases operational complexities.
• Financial sustainability: The onus is again on the community radio or media unit to ensure its own sustainability, but the agencies running these units are themselves limited in terms of resources and skills to “market” their footprint.

 
We believe that community radio broadcasting has a very different purpose, to create awareness, create a sense of bonding and trust among the local people, and to give them a medium to voice their demands. But we argue that it is not an appropriate medium for sector-specific information services because it relies on a centralized operational process that is difficult to execute in fragmented and cash-deprived environments, which are characteristic of Indian rural areas.

In the case of co-casting, domain experts and specific organizations working in different areas of development - agriculture, health, education, etc - all communicate directly with their respective communities on the ground. These organizations set up their own communication network to remain better connected with their field staff and communities. Gram Vaani’s technical solution makes this very low cost, and since broadcast licenses are not required upfront, it increases the speed to deployment. This gets around the problems mentioned earlier:

• Community engagement: Each sector-specific organization works with its community directly. Incentive structures are therefore cleaner.
• Program production: Co-casting removes the need to produce broadcast programs, and instead promotes interactive consultancy and feedback sessions between community members and the organization staff.
• Financial sustainability: Sector-specific organizations are responsible for their own financial health, again keeping the incentives cleaner.

 
 
3. Networked co-casting

Co-casting need not be executed in a stand-alone environment, but different co-casting communities can even be connected with one another. While local communities bring crucial context important for a better understanding, networking different communities increases their chances of learning serendipitously from each other and through diverse viewpoints on debatable matters. As shown in the figure below, GRINS deployments for co-casting can be easily linked to one another and used for content exchange. Three kinds of methods are supported for content distribution:

• Publish-subscribe: Co-casting deployments can request for certain types of content from other deployments. For example, if a node subscribes to content about agriculture in hindi, then any matching content produced anywhere in the network will be relayed across.
• Search: Operators running a co-casting node can search and request for certain content; the GRINS boxes locate and fetch the content.
• Multicast: Nodes can similarly push content to certain other selective nodes.

Downloaded content can be used to enhance the local databases, or videos can be telecast in small community gatherings.

 
Note that GRINS deployments can exchange content even without the need for Internet connectivity. It uses the VLink system developed at the University of Waterloo for reliable content distribution over CDs and USB keys. The content may therefore not be available instantaneously, but only when somebody moves from one village to another. Yet, this can be huge benefit, in fact, even for those locations that do not have a high bandwidth Internet connection.

4. Who should do co-casting

Any organization or group who feels that they can benefit from establishing a digital communication network between their community members, is an ideal candidate to do co-casting. This could include the following areas:

• Agriculture: NGOs who impart training in agricultural best practices can connect better with their field extension workers. The workers can in turn connect better with the farmers and other community members.
• Health: Hospitals or organizations involved in vaccinations, sanitation advice, HIV rehabilitation, and such, also need better communication mechanisms to connect with their staff and patients.
• Microfinance: One of the biggest challenges that microfinance faces is to train local entrepreneurs, help them get a feel of what the market wants, and to work smart. This requires the entrepreneurs to regularly exchange feedback from experts or mentors.
• Governance: RTI has brought about significant amounts of transparency in government processes, but to use RTI still requires awareness and sufficient knowledge of how to fill out forms, whom to address, etc. Phone-based grievance services make it easier for people to log complaints so that RTI experts can later follow on more rigorously. It is therefore helpful if RTI advocacy groups can be made more accessible from remote rural areas, so that more people can avail the service.

5. Co-casting in India

The closest groups in India whose activities emerge from a similar co-casting like vision are Digital Green and Digital Studyhall, both Microsoft Research projects:

• Digital Green: Digital Green has pioneered a novel method of agricultural training. Their staff works with local farmers to understand their problems, possible solutions, and together creates educational videos. These videos are then played out in farmer groups under the supervision of a local mediator or field extension worker. DG validated that such an interpersonal method of education is more effective in imparting good practices than just watching similar content over television.
• Digital Studyhall: Digital Studyhall believes in training the teachers. They record lectures by teachers in cities, and then play out these lectures to teachers in villages. In fact, some of the lectures are so good that in some places kids have begun to teach other kids! The novel aspect here is a hub-and-spoke model that DSH has evolved: they choose hub-schools in big cities like Lucknow, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, etc, and take out lectures to villages around the respective hubs. Locality of language and culture definitely seems to help create more effective learning experiences.

Co-casting draws heavily from both these efforts. Digital Green underscores the importance of people and direct interaction, while Digital Studyhall provides a solution for scalability with locality. Co-casting combines both the insights through low-cost and appropriate technology to engage efficiently with communities, innovative processes for community members to internalize information, and networked deployments to help different communities learn from one another.

6. Setting up a co-casting network

The best approach is to start simple, learn as you go, and allow yourself to evolve. Identify your community, do one deployment, learn, and then multiply. We will guide you through a planning process, the technology, operational processes that will be required, and finally the funding and costs. We are henceforth going to assume that you are an organization or institution that is already working in rural areas, and want to make your communication smoother and efficient.

6.1. Planning

You need to first identify your community and the kind of communication you want to enable. Co-casting is most useful if you want to connect directly with the people, or through your field staff. It is best to start with one of your most popular catchment areas. Once you have a pilot site in mind, think about what kind of communication processes you want to enable. We have classified these processes into the following, although variations and combination are likely to happen:

• Expert or mediator networking: This is where you would want your community members to call or send SMSes or letters to seek advice from the more experienced. Clearly, you will have to plan who these experts and mediators are going to be, when are they going to be available, are they going to give online advice of hear questions and reply offline, etc. You will need to know whether landline and cellular services are available in the area.
• Social networking: You may also want to enable a social communication medium through which community members can connect more easily with each other, ask questions, and reply to each other’s questions.
• In-person interactions: Do you have field staff to engage directly with the people? Physical engagement is known to be more effective to understand issues and provide better suggestions, and also to convince your community on appropriate practices to follow.
• Rendezvous: Do you have a physical office in the community, or have contacts with other organizations or people, where you can have your community members assemble and watch videos or have discussions in groups? This could also be the place where the GRINS box would be installed.

Essentially, use the planning phase to think about how you want to operationalize your co-casting network.

6.2. Technology

Co-casting just requires you to get a GRINS box, hook a phone line or cellphone to it, connect it to a television, a standard monitor-keyboard-mouse arrangement, and if you have an Internet connection then even better. The box will allow you to do the following:

• Record and edit audio content
• Add audio, video, images, etc and semantically tag and categorize them
• Schedule programs for playout over speakers or television to small groups of community members
• Receive phone calls and conference the callers with experts. Archive the conversation and edit it into a program.
• Allow callers to record questions or comments which can be later answered by experts.
• Receive SMSes from community members.
• Create polls and surveys which can be answered through phone calls or SMS responses.
• Share some of your programs with other GRINS deployments
• Search for programs shared by other deployments, and request to download them
• Subscribe to certain tags or categories to receive updates whenever matching content is created in the network.
• Push programs to other GRINS deployments that have expressed interest in your programs.

 
With such a rich set of services, it is only up to your imagination to think of good ways to use co-casting.

6.3. Processes for staff and volunteers

You will have to develop processes for your staff and volunteers such as the following: How often to hold playout sessions with community groups? When to be available for live discussions with community members? How often to go out into the field and follow up on discussions? You will require clarity on how people will use co-casting, and accordingly develop processes. A good way to start may be the following, based on Digital Green’s experiences:

• Equip your field extension workers with USB recorders or video cameras, and ask them to record questions from community members.
• Answer these questions and create comprehensive programs with help from experts, that are played out during group sittings.
• Feature the members in the video and audio recordings. This will retain their excitement in the content.
• Select a few skilled and experienced members as mediators. Listening to somebody from the same educational background has been seen to be more effective than listening to remote experts, who are often seen with distrust.

6.4. Funding

This is a rough estimate of the kind of expenses you need to be prepared to start and operate a co-casting station. Note that these are bare minimum costs and you may want to put in additional funds for a more extensive setup.

Component	Task	Approximate cost (INR)
Mic	Recording and live speech	2,000
GRINS box	Playout and editing	15,000
Telephony adapter	Playout and editing	5,000

 
This comes to an initial expenditure of Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 30,000. Add to this running costs for staff salaries, generator fuel, travel, etc of Rs. 5,000 per month.

7. Running a co-casting network

Think about what can fail! Technology failure is easy to repair. But the hardest part is losing the trust of your community. It is most important that your staff and volunteers who engage with the community members, follow sufficient rigour in their working. Absenteeism, unanswered questions, late response, ignoring requests, are all negatives which will reduce the trust your community places in your organization and the system. To ensure success, use the reporting feature of GRINS to track performance of your deployment, and follow it up with reports from your staff. Hold periodic surveys to directly get feedback from the people. All this will ensure a long term sustained running of your co-casting network.