Daniell Krawczyk

Daniell Krawczyk's primary passion is

Community Media Technology Integration

But what does mean to you, Joe Page-Viewer?

It helps to think of Community Media as having two forms.

The first form of Community Media (as represented by the Alliance for Community Media) is the result of 30+ years of legislation requiring local franchising of cable television providers. leading to thousands of local television stations providing PEG (Public, Educational, and Government) Access to their local communities over the cable system. These channels often give local citizens their only chance to communicate with their local community, observe local government in action, or find out what's happening in their school system. It's hard to say exactly what the local community sees on these channels or exactly how they can interact with them, because if you examined a random sampling of the stations represented on this map you would find just as many differences as similarities. Local politics determine whether stations are run by the cable company, the municipality, local school system/universities, or dedicated Non-Profit Organizations. In Town A, the Public Access channel might consist entirely of a PowerPoint loop notifying folks of Friday's Fish Fry, while 5 miles away in Town B the same Public Access channel might contain television programs submitted by local members who either produce them themselves (in the studio, in the "field", or in their basement) or who sponsor programming of local interest. All of this is say that its very hard to conduct a national (or even regional) conversation on this form of "Community Media" because while most people have flipped past their local PEG channels while channel-surfing, their local channels may have little in common with the person they are talking with.

The second form of Community Media is significantly less structured as it has little-to-no formal funding or outlet. And yet, it's exploded so quickly that it's landscape changes monthly. While it takes place almost entirely online, references to it are starting to turn up on highway billboards, network television, and even the New Oxford American Dictionary. Broadly, I'm talking about the growing use of personal media online to build community out of physically unconnected groups. Specifically I'm talking about podcasting, videoblogging, and, of course, Democracy.

The first Community Media has a 30+ year history. The new Community Media is so young it's history is still cementing. Either way, they happened without my involvement, but I'm trying to bring them together, primarily by creating technology that integrates into existing infrastructures. I'm doing this because I see a lot of potential in the pairing of participatory television and the participatory internet.

In the fall of 2003, I launched a project which I called the DigitalBicycle. It was formed to be a collaborative project, the result of numerous centers contributing effort into building a tool that would serve all of them, allowing them to distribute cablecast quality video at virtually no cost. Non-commercial broadcasters would have all the content they'd need to program 24/7 original content. Once built the system would be extremely efficient due to it's P2P nature, and all we needed to do was build the core tools (out of existing software and protocols) and for that we asked centers to contribute their most talented techies. Unfortunately, only a few centers were really willing to focus resources on this effort, and it's said that when it comes to software, you can't have all three: good, fast, and cheap. We had to do it cheap, and we wanted to do it good. So fast suffered. But... we're really nearing the finish line. If all goes as planned, we should be showing it off at a couple conferences this summer. If we do, it's all thanks to Peter Bull and Ben Sheldon who really bust their butts over this.
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