In this second CBAA conference preview item, AFTRS Director of Radio Steve Ahern continues the theme of Community Radio 2.0 in a preview of part of a presentation he will give at the CBAA conference about job roles and studio technology in the modern world of Community Media:

The Web 2.0 culture of contributed content is very much in keeping with the philosophy of community broadcasting, where everyone can potentialy have a voice. But radio station boards and technology planners will block that potential if they are not forward thinking when it comes to refitting their studios to make them ready for Community Radio 2.0.

Stations should seriously think of installing playout computers that have FTP or other types of online file transfer access, so that remote program makers (who in fact may never personally visit the station) can load their programs into the system ready for manual or automated replay at the program’s scheduled time.

This concept may be counter-intuitive to station pioneers who think of people physically coming together to create communty media as a result of critical mass, but they will have to understand that now, virtual critical mass can be just as effective. This will of course have implications for how community radio station buildings are set out: the volunteers room should have a ‘meeting computer’ equipped with Skype, Messenger and other such video conferencing software, so that remote program makers can still collaborate in program planning. And of course internal program specific messageboards using collaborative software such as Moodle and Wikis should be readily available to each program team.

Perhaps community radio stations should invest in licences for programs such as Protools and Adobe Audition, which they could allocate to remote program makers so that they can edit their programs on their own laptop, then send partly completed, commonly formatted files to others in the group to add further content, before it is uploaded to the station playout system. For instance a broadcaster could lay down an intro and music bed, then send the tracks to a collegue to ad interview material. They could then send it to a third person in the team, who would adjust levels and do the final mix, then send the file to the station for broadcast.

Taking this type of thinking to its logical end step, I wonder which community radio station will be the first to have no studios and no real-life presenters entering the building, just a computer connected to the net on one end and to a transmitter on the other. It might happen sooner than you think!