Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

Mobile at the nonprofit tech conference,
New Orleans 2.5 years after Katrina,
and a jazz archive in peril . . .

by Jen Gilomen, Lead Developer of Strategic Initiatives, BAVC

When Hurricane Katrina hit, David Freedman was thinking about the history of jazz. Specifically, he was thinking about how to save the 5,000+ original recordings, 50,000 LPs, and 25,000 CDs housed at his community radio station, WWOZ, in New Orleans. The first emergency — besides evacuating — was saving the vaulted archive of original recordings. David and I were both at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans in March, and the story of his station, combined with the overall vibe of the conference and some exploration of New Orleans two and a half years after the flood, got me thinking about what the ‘community’ in community media and technology really means.

As our plane circled over Lake Pontchartrain, I looked out the window with anxiety. I had been to New Orleans a few times prior, but not since the late ’90s, and I wasn’t sure what I expected to see from the airplane, but whatever it was made me nervous. I’ve seen the post-Katrina images online, of course, but what I hadn’t seen was much about the reconstruction. I later learned that this is because in some places, after over two years, little has changed except the water table.

From the tourist perspective — usually the view from one of the many open-air establishments in the French Quarter — you wouldn’t know Katrina had ever hit. Jocelyn Yin (BAVC’s program officer from ZeroDivide) and I strolled the streets at night, powdered our faces with Beignets, and stayed in a quaint if somewhat musty old hotel in the French Quarter near the conference site on Canal Street. In the evenings after the conference sessions had ended, I walked to the riverfront, took a couple hundred photos of the architecture and quirky offerings of New Orleans, had some Absinthe (certain brands are now legal in the U.S., thanks to the ingenuity of a New Orleans chemist), and walked through the residential areas that neighbor the French Quarter.

Downtown, there are some buildings boarded up, and in a few cases, I had to remind myself that this was not flood damage — it was flood aftermath. Any city that loses half of its population suddenly would show signs of economic decline, but seeing so much vacant downtown real estate is disorienting and bizarre. What, after all, is a city without its people — simultaneously its employees and its patrons — besides a destination for visitors like myself?

NTC08

At the NTEN conference, the reason 1,000 nonprofit technology buffs descended on New Orleans (as opposed to any other American city) this year was evident: tourism, and especially business tourism, are at least keeping one industry alive in New Orleans. According to the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau, the tourism industry is the city’s largest employer, and the hotel tax feeds $10.5 million annually into the Orleans Parish Public Schools. The NTC attracts what I call Good Geeks, who care about these facts. These are people who are more concerned about teachers communicating effectively with diverse populations of students, about noncommercial media, net neutrality, open source, and other technology-based grass-roots efforts. They’re the ones who even things out, so more people (and specifically, nonprofit people and the communities they serve) have access to the technologies that shape our lives. It’s important stuff that often goes unnoticed, but the NTC is a chance for all of the Good Geeks of the world to get together and, well, be Good Geeks together.

Besides catching conversations containing terminology you don’t hear in your daily life unless you’re a Good Geek yourself — Joomla vs. Drupal for your CMS, Salesforce database management, individual donor widgets — there were some new buzz words at NTC this year, and they centered around mobile applications. David Pogue, a New York Times blogger and the first conference keynote speaker I’ve ever seen burst into song and play the grand piano, offered a hilarious parody about the iPhone. As the final verse came to a close, iPhone enthusiasts across the conference room lifted their little glowing devices with glee, participating in something that we all knew should contain a little more sarcasm than it did. (But we can’t help ourselves! An open API!) That’s the NTC.

At a session called “The Ever Expanding Role of Mobile Devices,” I got my first grasp of how to run a text message (SMS) campaign. And I admit, I saw of future of text-message spam that I currently live without, and was a little afraid. But Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter (who works in the BAVC Annex at Koko Studios, but who I didn’t meet until the conference) made it all worthwhile by teaching us how to buck the system — a system controlled by just a few companies who own the “short codes” that make mobile campaigns possible. (For a few takeaways, stay tuned for a related BAVC blog post on mobile campaigns.)

Jazz archives, a call for help, and the big ol’ van

Bucking the system with a combination of grass-roots effort and technology brings me back to David Freedman and that jazz archive, and what David did when the water was rising, New Orleans was on lock-down, and he had to get that music out. The water came within a foot of the loading dock where the bulk of the original recordings were stored, and they were rescued. But there were still 50,000 LPs and 25,000 CDs in a temporary storage unit with a damaged roof. David located a roofer, and with a Rolling Stone photographer in toe, created a fake TV station ID and (nervously) passed the state trooper checkpoint to get into the city, following a caravan of legitimate TV station vans. This motley crew then repaired the roof, hoping to at least salvage the CDs, but without much hope for the albums.

To put it in perspective, you have to remember what most community radio stations are like: resource-deprived, grass-roots, run by (and usually funded by) the community they serve. In the case of WWOZ, the program hosts are ninety volunteers who, when the station relocated to a temporary location in Baton Rouge shortly after Katrina, drove two hours each way with their collections to run their three-hour time slot. Community radio stations rarely have the resources to do larger projects like digitization, preservation, and metatagging. WWOZ’s membership provides 70-80% of the station funding, and the station was just weeks away from their semiannual pledge drive.

“When I finally tracked down my bookkeeper in Atlanta,” Freedman says, “I asked her, ‘How much do we have in the bank?’ And she said, ‘You ain’t got nothin’ in the bank!’” So they had no resources to draw from. From a hotel room in Hot Springs, Arkansas, David broadcasted pleas from “WWOZ in Exile,” an online station. Several people from the ‘community radio community’ acted quickly to help — both listeners and other community radio stations. Ultimately — and here’s the true ‘community’ in the story — 32 different community radio stations from around the country supported WWOZ to get them back on the air. One station, KSDS in San Diego, even tied their own pledge drive to WWOZ, offering up 10% of their pledge drive funds to the cause.

What David did with the money is another success of the community media effort. The station purchased a van and equipped it with broadcasting capabilities, then put the call letters of each contributing community radio station on the van. The van not only allows them to stay up and running in the event of a natural disaster, but also to broadcast from live events. David let the group of stations know that they were part of the “Katrina Network”: when any of those stations has a disaster of any kind, they can use the van.

Once the recordings were rescued, the Grammy Foundation stepped in to help, and WWOZ, the Grammy Foundation, and the Library of Congress now have a three-way partnership to preserve the entire archive. The partnership, and the story of community support itself, are emblematic of the unique value of community radio in documenting and preserving local culture that we all can enjoy and learn from. It’s too bad the value often isn’t fully recognized until its loss is eminent, but still.

In the end, because the city couldn’t provide their building with power, the station had to relocate to the French Market building in the French Quarter. They have more space, but David has mixed feelings about it. “We were in Armstrong Park, a historic area. Those are the roots for that music,” David says. “The French Quarter is like the marketplace, not the place the music comes from. It’s like good okra that you get at the market — it wasn’t grown in the French Market, it was grown in the land outside the city. Music grows in the neighborhoods. I think those are the cultural wetlands of not only New Orleans, but America.”

Post-conference, post-Katrina

When the conference was over, I had the opportunity to visit some of those wetlands, including one of the wettest ones, the now infamous Ninth Ward. On an informative post-Katrina tour with a small local company called Tours by Isabelle, I got the local’s perspective of the reconstruction process, if it can even be called a process. And — except for a few rows of brightly colored Habitat for Humanity homes called “musician’s row,” designed with local musicians, the status of the process is very, very dim. On a given block in the Ninth Ward, there could be one or two families back in their homes, surrounded by constant reminders of the storm — the absence of their former neighbors, the FEMA vans that many families are still living in, the piles of debris, and the somber, relentless quiet. The biggest tragedy, besides the failure of the reconstruction, is that the very guts of this community have been ripped out.

What will happen to noncommercial media if it moves into the French Market of America?

The explosion of community radio was a result of not only the foresight of the original Carnegie Commission and Congress to allocate part of our dials to noncommercial media, but also the actions of a guy named Lorenzo Milam, a subversive all-star who learned the technology and tricks and published a how-to manual for FM licensing and community radio in 1972. He called it “Sex and Broadcasting” because, Freedman says, Milam’s grandmother assured him that it would sell more copies than a descriptive title. She was right. Freedman himself, starting up a community station in Santa Cruz at the time, “created a corporation of a bunch of nobodies, walking around Santa Cruz,” he says. “We were bare-footed, long-haired, and not something CPB wanted anything to do with.” Thirty years later, the nation’s network of community radio stations, connected through the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB), are “good citizens in the radio world,” he says, and “CPB not only involves us, but there’s a place for us there now; they’d be upset if we didn’t have a role.”

And while community media may have lost some of the renegade reputation that it had in the ’70s, when BAVC was born and the organization consisted of a few guys were running around with Porta Packs, it has grown into its own without losing, we hope, the community spirit in which it began. As BAVC and our own ‘community of community media’ continue to think about technologies of the future — who will have access to them, use them, profit from them, and learn from them — we need to remember the importance of localism, the preservation of the “authentic space” for people to create, collaborate, express themselves, and enrich themselves that is the heart of community media.