Participatory Rural Appraisal

This scheme has been proposed by the World Bank to help assess the situation of rural people, and collaboratively come up with a set of remedial procedures. It seeks to tap into the local knowledge, and empower people to help themselves. The key tenets of the PRA include participation, teamwork, flexibility, information gathering at an on-demand basis, and triangulation of opinions from multiple sources to ensure correctness and reliability. A lot of the ideas are very similar to our vision of the global brain.

A prime organization supporting this movement is Insight, who have pioneered the use of participatory video as a tool for empowering communities. It is similar to Witness, but focuses more on training methods for making videos.

What we need next is a video version of the community radio.

The community radio movement is being pushed across the world by organizations like AMARC, and has matured to a great extent with UNESCO handbooks being available to set up appropriate organizational structures to initiate community radio programs, train the people to make new radio programs, and guidelines of technical steps to set up the systems. The whole movement is very active in places like Nepal, Bangladesh, and S. America, but the Indian government has still not given the go for it. Educational campuses are allowed to set up the systems, but NGOs and non-profits are excluded from it. However, the potential is well recognized, and there is also an online petition going on to open up community radio in India! The Community Radio Network maintains how-tos on setting up systems in India.

The costs to set up community radio mentioned in the handbooks are quite high, but I believe that they can be minimized to under 1000$ per station covering 15-20km by using PCI based FM cards. Such systems can be installed easily in village Internet kiosks, and programs can be recorded for broadcasting in the local community. Community radio forms an important component of the Global Brain project, and my aim is to use reputation, social networks, and content based routing to circulate local content in neighboring areas, and even across the world. In the long term, couple it with sousveillance systems to keep track of performance appraisal of government officials and politicians, and to give a more process oriented turn to media by building clever analysis tools that make it easy to observe trends and correlations.

Converting the community radio movement into a community television movement in a cheap fashion is really the next technical challenge. Tools like Democracy TV, Al Gore's Current TV channel, and IPTV, coupled with TiVO like DVR systems can potentially be one answer, even for rural areas.