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by Jason Daniels
This illustration is a reflection of a lot of tech heavy thinking and talking, listening and reading over the past few months around reframing local community and PEG access TV. It also is about my experiences working at a small community TV station.

I've been trying to think about how to visualize a community media center, which I'm feeling increasingly comfortable calling a public access media center after Free Press did a great presentation at the NAMAC conference about New Public Media. I didn't know where to put the "access" but was not ready to drop it totally.

Let me sort of describe this image above. Within a small organization that has the tools of media creation and distribution are smaller groups, clusters of people, micro communities. They could be 2-3 people, or many more, depending on the community interests and dynamics, the organizational history and the staffing expertise. These groups are the colored circles and I think they really do vary in size and shape between communities but they fundamentally cover the activities of PEG access TV and more broadly community media. They are separated so as to be distinct programmatic activities that are budgeted for and coordinated by the staff.

Collective TV production; training and education; mobile (van) productions - all this jazz - is a vital piece of a local media organization. Concerts, Town Meetings, parades - covering community events - meets a need. (I must disclose that I work in small suburban community where there is one community unit. This must be more complicated for urban community media centers that have overlapping cultural communities.) There is real need here. Developing this small core could offset asking organizations to cover events themselves, or pay for production crews. Maybe there is a hybrid model in gestation here.

Civijournalism is a burgeoning opportunity for a local public access media center. There is a void, and an opportunity for partnerships with newspapers, municipalities and other media outlets. This frame also sets an agenda for education in media literacy and community engagement.

NPO collaborations bubble up through the smaller micro communities of activity. Sometimes the best way to reach the adult population is tapping into the existing organizations. Meeting these groups more than halfway is a reality. We can help with messaging. These collaborations are here to meet a need and to strengthen community at large.

Storytelling is an umbrella term that supports many dimensions of media making. This spectrum ranges from videoblogging and sort of ego driven programs, to niche/narrowcast TV shows (not necessarily 29/59 minutes, though) to oral history initiatives. Before you can make a TV show or a video, or even teach the basics of videojournalism the fundamental aspect of storytelling really taps into the power of a location based media operation.

Film and animation is a micro community that can tap the resources of a local organization. It is the creativity, the celebration of life that fuels bike ins and micro cinemas and really does a lot to stretch the imagination of what is possible. Animation (in the broadest sense of the word - to bring to life) will never go out of style and I think supporting animation is a real vehicle for stimulating minds, and ensuring that the future generation has an imagination with which to process the world.

Public data pipes are the backbone of the public media infrastructure. A policy driven issue a the core of this revival in public media/public access.

The three toolsets that enable these communities are a reductive and subjective model based on the PEG TV model. It might be more clearly articulated in the original illustration.

Although, in the newer diagram, the Server sits at the heart of an a public access media operation and maps itself nicely onto the Open Media Project. Beyond the tools at a physical location are the people, the staff, and I think I spent so much time defining the communities of users that I missed the staff part. Staff then leads to Board and putting those cogs in a row are issues monumental unto themselves.