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FORMERLY LOCAL RADIO & TELEVISION
A. Members
How is the membership of the Section/Working Group composed? Consider both those included in the mailing lists used by the Section/Working Group officers and those eventually provided by the Treasurer's office (based on the indication of research interest included in the annual fee forms)? If possible, give members by countries, by institutions (university, non-academic research institution, other) and by gender. Also, how many of them attended the last conference in Barcelona and how many of them are reachable by email (total numbers only)? Finally, what is the way to elect Section/Working Group head? The section leader is elected by majority vote once every 4 years at the business meeting during a General Assembly. We have discussed the possibility of sending out email ballots to the current membership list for future elections, but were waiting for some direction from the General Assembly. Total Community Communication section members are approximately 109 (based on current lists sent from IAMCR, though I believe this list is underinclusive. Membership breakdown by countries is as follows: Australia: 4
Austria: 1
Bangladesh: 1
Belgium: 1
Brazil: 2
Canada: 2
Colombia: 1
Denmark: 2
Egypt: 1
France: 4
Germany: 1
Ghana: 1
Greece: 1
Guatemala: 1
Hong Kong: 1
India: 8
Indonesia: 3
Ireland: 1
Israel: 1
Japan: 8
Korea: 1
Malaysia: 1
Mexico: 2
Mozambique : 1
Netherlands: 1
New Zealand: 1
Nigeria: 1
Peru: 2
Scotland: 1
Singapore: 2
South Africa: 3
Spain: 7
Sri Lanka: 1
Sweden: 1
Switzerland: 2
Taiwan: 1
Thailand: 3
Turkey: 1
United Arab Emirates: 2
UK: 7
USA: 22
Yugoslavia: 1 The membership breakdown by type of institution is estimated as follows: Academic: 84
Nonacademic research institutions: 9
Nonresearch NGOs: 3
Nonresearch Government organizations: 1
Professional Media/Associations: 3
Unknown: 9 I have no reliable numbers on how many attended the last conference in Barcelona, though based on being present during most of the sessions, I would guess about 70. 104 are reachable by email. The Section Head is currently selected through an open nomination and voting process that takes place during the section meeting during one of the main conference years.
B. Activities
1. Identify the number of sessions and their organization in Barcelona (invitation versus competitive review of submissions/abstracts or full papers). All papers and panels underwent the same submission process (nothing was invited). We reviewed both short and extended abstracts. We hosted 7 sessions in our division (squeezing 2 sessions into a 2 hour time slot, since we were only allotted 6 sessions), 7 poster papers, and an additional joint session with the Participatory Communication Section. 2. Indicate if, what, and how efforts were made with regard to inclusion (regional, gender, status, etc.). Efforts were made to accommodate presentations in Spanish as well as English. Informal translation was arranged on a volunteer basis for the conference presentations themselves and abstracts received in Spanish were translated on a volunteer basis. We made every effort to include as many papers as possible and to accept papers that met our quality prerequisites. 3. Indicate how many submissions were received, how many were selected, and how the decisions were made (subcommittee, other methods). 60 submissions were received, and 27 were accepted. A subcommittee consisting of the section head and 2 section co-heads reviewed and rated (on a scale of 0-3) each submission according to the following criteria: theory, method, contribution, accept/reject, and overall rank. Final selection was contingent on the approval of the entire subcommittee. 4. Indicate how well each of the sessions contributed to meeting the goals of the Section/Working Group: what was the attendance; what was the level and quality of the interaction; what was the quality of the papers and the presentations? Because we also co-hosted a pre-conference (OURMedia II), session attendance was extraordinarily high. Many preconference participants attended our sessions. Every session was standing room only, and I would estimate that about 75-100 people attended each session. The level and quality of interaction was high, and many people commented to me that they found the sessions dynamic and stimulating. Papers and panels were also top quality, as we had to reject over half of those who sought to attend Barcelona. 5. Indicate how many submissions were received and selected for Taiwan. 25 submissions were received for Taiwan and 21 were selected for inclusion. 6. Characterize the distinctions, if any, between off-year and General Assembly meetings. I think General Assembly years we have more people submitting and attending, but I think the crucial difference is not whether it's an off-year conference but the actual location of the conference. Taipei was just not as exciting or convenient to the section membership as Barcelona. 7. Identify other (out of conference) eventual activities: newsletter, website, Internet interaction, meetings, etc.? Indicate level of participation among members and others. Our section regularly contributes to the IAMCR newsletter. Many of our members also belong to the OURMedia group, which has an active mailing list. Lately, our section has also organized field trips to community media groups in the conference countries, and these have proved very popular with the membership.
C. Mission statement
(Give a short statement of the aims and objectives of the Section/Working Group.) The Community Communication section focuses on communication that originates, circulates and resonates with communities, broadly defined. We seek to advance research on the objectives, practices and dynamics of community communication expressed across all types of media and symbol systems and formed around locality, politics, socio-economics, language, ethnicity, gender, or other interests and intersections. We welcome both theoretical and applied research, as well as research conducted at both micro and macro levels of analysis. Our concerns include issues of media access, participation and reception; media projects undertaken by marginalized and underrepresented groups; development and support of public and community-based media institutions and infrastructures; production and distribution of community, alternative and activist media; and theoretical contributions to the research, evaluation and practice of community communication.
D. Evaluation and plans
Indicate what the Section/Working Group sees as its successes and failures (if any), as well as opportunities and plans for improvement or movement toward specified goals. Indicate also how the Section/Working Group sees its relation to other Sections/Working Groups -- including which Working Groups belong under which Section (as determined by the new Statutes) and whether the Section/Working Group is prepared to consider merging with any other. We saw Barcelona, and the co-sponsoring and support for the OURMedia pre-conference as a major success. It brought some new members and vitality to the section. We will again co-sponsor this conference in Porto Alegre. We will help to support it and encourage interaction between this group and our section members. We will again be looking to organize site visits to community and alternative media in Brazil. We have also generated several publications out of our section meetings, including a recent special edition of a journal based on the Barcelona conference and a new edition of the book, "Community Media in the Information Age," (Ed, Jankowski). We have some overlap in terms of aims and goals with the Participatory Communication Section and have tentative conversations about merging the 2 sections. Both groups are interested in community communication, but PCR has more of a development communication focus while CC has more of an alternative media and mediating technologies focus. We have explored collaboration at the past two conferences by sharing abstracts with each other that seem to speak to both sections, and organizing joint sessions between the two groups. Members of both groups have also discussed in their section meetings the possibility of an eventual merger of the two sections, possibly under a name such as "Public Communication."
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2004 Report
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