[cr-india] Radio Monsoon -- sourcing weather info from fishermen

[Vickram Crishna]

This is such a wonderful treat!


Some years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the MSSRF facility in Tamil 
Nadu, where local narrowcasting using loudspeakers was being managed in a village setting, with the information being fed long-distance through a private radio link. 


ISRO had arranged for wave data to be collected by satellite, and fed to a 
processing center in Delhi. The resulting information was not fed to AIR (as might be thought logical), but rather sent by fax to Chennai, where it was doubtless used to wrap fish the next day. MSS was very keen to 
have the information sent directly to MSSRF so that the foundation could arrange for relaying it to fishing villages (this is all pre-tsunami 
history, folks). 
 
The
 point of the paragraph above is that the key data, wave heights, had 
been allowed to become the 'property' of the various scientific 
institutions involved in turning it into information, in the process 
losing sight of the purpose of the information in the first place, which
 was guiding fishermen to stay away from dangerous waters. 

Now,
 for the
 first time, wave data, perhaps not as accurate or reliable as 
satellite-gathered data, but most importantly, gathered by the people 
who are most affected by it, will be disseminated to like-minded people.
 I really hope this scheme takes off. And I hope that it is followed by 
many more such schemes.

The point of 
government control of community media is the organisational desire to 
control information, even at the cost of destroying the value of that 
information (wave data generally expires in hours). This is at the heart
 of the farcical community radio policy and rules. 

Rather
 than forever fighting the rules and attempting to discover new 
innovative technologies, only to find that some babu has twisted common 
sense to block them as well, I think we need to encourage communities to
 look for better ways to generate and share the critical information 
they really need. Once this centralised monopoly attitude is trashed for
 what it is, further
 throttling of the community media sector will no longer be necessary 
(except for truly dog-in-the-manger remnants) and will hopefully wither 
away, sooner rather than later. 


Vickram
http://communicall.wordpress.com
http://vvcrishna.wordpress.com
On Tuesday, 8 April 2014, 10:35, sajan venniyoor <venniyoor at gmail.com> wrote:
 
Sourcing weather info from fishermen at sea
>Rasheed Kappan | Deccan Herald | March 26, 2014
>
>How about a system that sources real-time information on weather from GPS-equipped fishermen at sea, processes this vital data through scientists and researchers, and disseminates it quickly to the fishing community via mobile phones, radio and the internet?
>
>A pilot project by a network of private and public institutions, with technological input from Bangalore has now shown that this is an eminently workable idea.
>
>It’s called the Radio Monsoon, where fishermen talk waves! Simply put, this is what the project does, as explained by the brains behind it: “For a traditional fisherman on a small boat or a canoe, the state of the sea and the sky makes all the difference – fish or no fish, safety or risk to life.
>
>To contribute to safe and better fishing, we disseminate regular forecasts on weather, wind, waves, currents, and fishing zones.” The medium used: small loudspeakers on the coast, over the Internet, by word of mouth or through a free phone number.
>
>But this is a two-way process. “We listen to the fishers – what their own forecast is, what is it like out there in the sea when they go to fish everyday. We try to spot where these responses are coming from using the fishers’ own GPS sets. We process and give this feedback to the scientists – making a regular two way communication possible.”
>
>The tech team in Bangalore is currently trying out an innovative, interactive platform to make the communication even simpler. Explained the team lead, Shruthi S., “We fit iPhones with a professional field reporting software, a set of specialist microphones, and wind shields for use on the windy coast. Our field reporter/s use this gadget to record the views of the fisherfolk in our test site and pass it on to our studio in Thiruvananthapuram.”
>
>The programmes are made in the studio and transferred to the Bangalore hub - for further dissemination. “We upload it in SoundCloud and to a dedicated server at Gramvaani, an IIT Delhi-based start-up. Now the fisherfolk can straightaway dial up the free phone number of the server, leave a missed call and get weather info, anytime they want.”
>
>This was tested successfully and demonstrated recently at a workshop in Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS).
>
>At the village -- Vizhinjam in Thiruvananthapuram was chosen for the pilot--, Radio Monsoon plays the narrowcasts downloaded from the server over mobile phones. This is amplified by portable speakers linked by Bluetooth. The tech interface for this is tested and tweaked in Bangalore.
>
>The next step, as Shruthi informed, is to enable social media updates by the fisherfolk themselves.
>
>“It could be Whatsapp, Twitter....even Facebook. We need to test on the ground first.”Once the six-month pilot is completed, the project intends to broadcast real-time relevant radio programmes over All India Radio.
>
>A trained team of reporters / producers will be aided to set up their own community initiative. The project’s success is bound to be propel duplication in the coastal belt of Karnataka.
>
>Besides INCOIS and Gramvaani, the project has data, technology and consultation support from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the climate migration research group of the University of Sussex and a climate-knowledge sharing initiative supported by the Sussex Innovation Centre.
>
>
>
>Source: http://www.deccanherald.com/content/394893/sourcing-weather-info-fishermen-sea.html
>
>
>Join the Community Radio Forum.
>
>
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