Digital Arts Service Corps - policy

Reading my way to victory

Brandy Doyle — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:41:34 +0000

In my first month at Prometheus, I did a lot of reading. I familiarized myself with some of the issues under discussion at the FCC, such as rural commercial radio, digital radio, Tribal radio, and diversity reporting. Part of my job is translating these complex regulatory issues into terms that ordinary people can understand, so I first need to build my own expertise on radio regulation. It's an ongoing process.

Apart from reading, one of the best ways I've learned about the organization has been by volunteering to edit various documents that others are producing. By editing grant applications, newsletter articles, and press releases, I quickly learned about Prometheus’ current activities and priorities. I also joined a group tasked with rewriting our mission, vision, and values statements, which has helped me to understand the big-picture aims of the organization.

These tasks have been helpful in defining my own role at Prometheus, based on the needs of the organization and my own skill set. In the coming months, I plan to build a strategy to make Prometheus’ vast knowledge of media regulation more “user-friendly” and more widely distributed (mostly through blog entries and other articles). I also hope to reorganize our internal files on regulatory policy and to help with a more accessible regulatory policy section on the website.

Intellectual Property and Community Media

Colleen Kelly — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:59:13 +0000

This is an article written by Reebee Garofalo. He's a professor who teaches about music and social movements at UMass.

Copyright: Its Still About the Content, Stupid.
By Reebee Garofalo
Original article can be found at: http://acmboston.org/node/340

Reebee Garofalo is an internationally known scholar of popular music studies, professor at UMass/Boston, and founder of the Community Media and Technology Program at UMB's College of Public and Community Service, where he has taught since 1978.

For the last 30 or so years, I have been a popular music activist and educator. I have been asked to comment on the relevance of copyright law to community media. This fits with my own agenda for a couple of reasons: first, that music tends to get underrepresented in discussions of communication policy and media transformation (except when we want to censor it), and second, most of the copyright battles that will eventually plague all media have already happened in the music industry. We can learn a lot about the future by looking at the history of these struggles.

Read attachment for more.

Work at CTOC

dana sou — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:06:24 +0000

So whats been going on at CTOC (community technology organizing consortium) since I started my Vista-ship back in November? Well, from November to the beginning of January I spent a lot of the time doing outreach for a Holiday event we held. That turned out to be a bit of a flop on attendance and I did feel like a bit of a failure to my organization but I got over it. I realized the causes of low attendannce were various...new event location, holiday season, etc. It was my first few weeks on the job so I wasn't too hard on myself. As soon as that was over we got a call from CTCNet to help with outreach for the Los Angeles institutes, as they were lacking in registration. So the week and a half long tasks of phone calls, e-mails, and e-vites began again. This turned out to be much much better. The CTCNet institute was quite interesting and informative. Unlike many of the CTCVista's I lack in being "tech savvy" so I never realized the capabilities of various software components and its ability to provide access to the disabled.

Amidst outreach calls and two events, I spent a lot of time reading up on broadband/technology issues - policies, capacity, its effects on society as a whole - and wow have I learned a whole lot about the need to address the various issues surroundung this! My supervisor has been great in sharing her knowledge with the issues- she really knows her stuff and has helped me a lot. I also work alongside ex-vista Sheveeta once a week so I'd have to say that I've got pretty good support going on here.

This week I've started some research on the broadband debate. I think I am going to be doing a mini-analyses on where the issue lies now and the importance of CTOC's position as a community and social advocate. Hopefully this will help us land some grants later on as we are lacking in funding as well.

If anyone has any leads as to where I can access reading material for my research i.e policies, debates, books, etc, that would be awesome. I seem to be only finding U.K websites that cover the issue in depth.

To summarize, I've done outreach for two events, familiarized myself with technology as a whole, thinking of ways to fundraise, and starting a mini research project, as well as manning the admin side to our office from time to time.

I really hadn't felt like I was doing a whole lot but now that I've written it all down I feel a little overwhelmed! : ) All good nontheless.