Community Radio (CR) stations are short range FM stations that seek to meet the needs of their listeners by involving them in content creation, feedback, and station management. In India, the community radio movement took off in 2008 when the first set of CR stations became operational. During that period we began design and development of the Gramin Radio Inter-Networking System (GRINS), an automation system designed to meet the ICT needs of CR stations. Over the last 2.5 years we have commercialized GRINS and deployed it at 19 CR stations in India and South Africa. In this paper, we present our experiences of software feature design, installation, training, technical support, and commercialization of GRINS in India.We demonstrate a number of aspects: Building a small feature set at first, and then adding features on-demand ensures that utility of the software is maintained and imposition of developers' assumptions is avoided. The common notion of keeping costs low for developing regions should not come at the sacrifice of stability of the solution. Standardization of deployments, even at the loss of flexibility for the customers, is important to keep the costs of technical support low. Through technical support data collected over one year, we show that physical moving parts are easy targets to introduce faults. Although identification of most faults can be done over the phone, remote Internet access is needed to resolve many faults. Finally, we highlight that selling to NGOs is hard; the best way is to club the sale as a part of a larger project for which the NGO is being funded. We believe these insights will be useful to guide others who want to commercially provide ICT solutions in developing regions.
Community Radio Stations are short range FM radio stations that attempt to meet the information needs of communities situated around them. While the concept of community radio is not new, the widespread proliferation of mobile phones has generated renewed interest in using phones in conjunction with radio for closer community engagement. Radio stations in developing regions are keenly looking for solutions to do this efficiently, as well as solve several other ICT challenges including content management, fault diagnosis, and reduced cost of setup. We have designed the Gramin Radio Inter Networking System (GRINS) to address these issues. In this paper, we describe the GRINS architecture, experimental setups to evaluate audio performance on lowcost commodity hardware, and a formally expressible framework to describe and diagnose radio station configurations. Our techniques and insights can serve to help other technological interventions meant for developing regions.
In this paper, we describe several IVR usage and learnability insights that emerged from a singing competition held by a community radio station located in an urban community of low-income migrant workers. Our community radio station partner, Gurgaon Ki Awaaz, relies heavily on folk songs to build its content repository and develop a close rapport with its community; the station organized a competition called Gurgaon Idol, in which community members could call into an IVR system to record their songs, and vote to select the best songs. Our research yielded several insightful results on how to best solicit audio recordings on IVR, methods for crowdsourced voting on IVR, cultural preferences towards certain voting methods, how to help first-time IVR users learn the system, and practical tips to keep in mind when running such a competition. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore usability of voice user interfaces for recording audio and for crowdsourced voting over IVR systems.We begin with describing the context in which Gurgaon Ki Aawaz operates and their motivations for holding this competition. We then present an overview of the Gurgaon Idol competition, and specific IVR related research questions we are interested in answering. Section 4 describes in detail several usability tests we ran with over 80 subjects, and Section 5 describes the actual competition as it unfolded on the ground. Finally, a discussion section is presented on our reflections from running the competition.
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