Latest news

Brisbane community digital stations celebrated the launch of services through a variety of individual launch events and activities.

On Friday May 13, a national launch event was held to celebrate the establishment of community digital radio services in mainland capital cities around the country.

9 Melbourne stations gathered together at federation square at 11am on Thursday the 14th of April to celebrate the beginning of community digital radio services.

The ACMA has developed a series of guidelines to assist community broadcasting licensees to understand their responsibilities under the Broadcasting Services Act (1992).

Abstract
This paper looks at the role of Australian Policy Online (APO) as a collection of ‘grey’ public policy research and considers how this fits within the broader context of open access publishing and policy development. The amount of grey literature now being produced presents challenges for APO as well as other collecting agencies and society in general. This paper looks at who is operating in this space in Australia, the issues for collecting and preserving grey literature, and how bibliographic exchange and interoperability can help us to manage the flood of new material and reduce the duplicated effort that currently exists. While APO has been a foundational player in this field, it has reached a stage where a new solution is required - a national online collaborative collection of full text digital resources created with a vision for the benefits that the semantic web will bring.

Abstract
Network technologies are very desirable for social action, allowing activists to achieve more with less, more quickly and with broader impact; on the other hand, the very advantages they bring are equally important to the world of contemporary capitalism that social action seeks to change. Thus, we must look beyond network technologies as the easy solution to every problem, and focus instead on the human relationships which might be enabled by them. This focus on relationships requires us to ‘de-tool’ information technology. Instead, for social action, it is more valuable to think of networked computing as part of the environment within which action can occur; an important purpose for such action; and as a medium that nurtures expression and engagement of self and belief.

Abstract
The internet provides a means for non-professional media-makers to produce and publish their own video and audio content, as community television and radio have done for several decades. While the web seems to exemplify the principles of media access and diversity championed by the community media sector, it also raises challenges for broadcast community media participants and their online equivalents, not least being the co-opting of the term ‘community media’ by large commercial interests. A symposium held in Melbourne by Open Spectrum Australia (‘Quality/Control’, State Library of Victoria, Oct 2008) brought together people with a wide range of community media experience to discuss this and other issues, particularly the possibilities for greater cooperation between broadcast and online community media participants.

This paper draws on participant contributions at the symposium to explore the relationship between broadcast and online community media. Despite shared values, we identify different, and possibly incompatible, cultures within the two groups. We argue that this disjoint stems from two different systems of control or validation (licensing and networks), as well as producer-centered accounts of community media that are out of sync with the contemporary media environment. Instead, we propose that theory and practice begin to address issues of consumption in relation to community media, including identification, navigation and the notion of ethical choice.