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Fabrik’s Head of Product, Anice Hassim, addresses attendees of the Association of Christian Media conference on ‘The Future of Modern Radio Engagement.’

Radio has always been dependent on the studio phone lines to maintain a thin connection and narrow aperture to the outside world. To the extent that there was a return path, this was it. Things are better these days with social media allowing for an alternative and richer aperture but nothing beats the warmth and basic human connection of someone’s voice. Voice has always been radio’s resonance. It creates connection and belonging. It makes radio your companion. You aren’t just part of some anonymous beast — you are a part of the community. When the voice goes, some of radio’s magic goes. Our Fabrik media platform allows modern radio to completely transform their intimacy with their audience in the realtime and one of the major uses is to land Voice Notes and media into the studio at scale. Last night we had a brief outage on one of our Cloud Services and for the modern media platforms using our Fabrik platform; it was the equivalent of the phone lines going down. Except worse. The historically thin aperture of the studio lines and its analogue workflow meant that it is used in very specific ways e.g. current affairs shows and competitions. If the lines went down, you could repair for a little while around it and usually no one would worry. Modern cloud tools like Fabrik remove these limitations and create a constant stream of interaction in the realtime. Conversation and engagement is blended into all parts of the broadcast day and it is a rich and broad media mix of text, voice, images and video. The cloud service glitch last night for that brief period had an immediate dampening effect in our client studios. It is like the background chatter of the bazaar suddenly going silent. You don’t notice it until it’s not there.

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Of all of the media types that have been disrupted by technology over the past decade or two, radio is unique in its ability to claim a relevance and even lead the way to the future. If only we would stop thinking of radio as frequency. Spectrum yes, but frequency no. What used to be an audio-only medium created a laser focus on radio’s secret weapon — personality. And even when personality became commoditised and proxied through automation and corporatisation of music choice and opinion, it still drew its power through human expression and passion. But if radio trusted its heart and allowed itself to blossom in the full spectrum of digital, then it may offer a very powerful and compelling alternative to television and the kind of pricing power that television attracts. It can do this, because it alone of all mediums, other than news channels, is completely realtime where the lag between what is being broadcast and its reception is near instantaneous. This gives radio a powerful role as facilitator and curator of the common voice of a community. With technology, it can now expand that signal away from just audio and enrich it with video, image, text, conversation and context. Being, in the main, highly regional or highly focused around a specific content community, radio is a high trust medium and, certainly in our audience behaviour, we are conditioned to consume it that way. As radio consumers, we trust its weather reports, the traffic updates and the sly dig at City Hall to reveal a context about navigating our reality that we thread dependence upon in our daily lives. Radio is currently a fabric that binds the lives of well over 30 million South Africans on a daily basis. As data access and accessibility broaden rapidly in the decade ahead, those South Africans will switch their consumption of radio from analogue FM to mobile. This transition is not really in doubt anymore, but it has been interesting to see the relative paralysis in embracing it. The role of radio as curator is important since one of the consequences of the digital disruption has been the difficulty for brands to transition to a position of trust in digital. Radio’s role as an influencer and endorser will be amplified by its trust quotient with the audience – that will set it apart from more sterile and remote media types. Few radio stations have fully, natively and completely embraced the full spectrum of digital. Primarily, trad media treated digital with suspicion and as a threat so that any engagement with it was shallow, grudging and inarticulate. This wasn’t helped by the fact that digital exacerbated a generational divide in media businesses where the overriding imperative became a drive to “juniorise” teams, not to allow a blending of opinions and tactics, but as a cost-cutting drive. In short, they threw out the experienced craftsmen and women and brought in workflow operators who were expected to do the OLD things only cheaper. Convergence increases nuance, it doesn’t reduce it. As digital drove convergence we needed more diverse, multidisciplinary teams to be able to shape and craft the new products. But now ubiquitous digital consumption devices provide a clear platform for a new richer, realtime, converged and curated media voice to emerge. And I believe it could be led by radio. Radio has personality, radio has a human voice at its core, the human voice being still the undisputed king of trust building. The current obsession with seeing radio only through the prism of an audio-first medium has to change. Because of this tunnel vision radio may miss the moment of opportunity digital offers it — to take its current massive scale and to make it even more realtime and smart, fully duplex, and to utilise data to engage and add value to audiences in an authentic, trusted yet profitable manner. This will make radio something of a media chameleon — having the ability to mimic the qualities of competing media types in the realtime as context allows. To the segment of the audience stuck in traffic, it may be the audio-only element broadcast into their car speakers. To the listener in the coffee shop, it may be a richer stream of text, opinion, conversation and polling. To the mom on the couch it may bloom full spectrum with video, social, analysis and meta-data all streaming, realtime and sharable. And radio can retain its personality and human essence throughout. Radio in effect, will be able to surf the continuum of engagement from very shallow to deeply immersed without losing the audience to competing media along the way. Folded into a network, future radio can be a powerful contributor to media content and the communal conversation going forward. But to achieve all this, radio is going to have to start converging their efforts — commercial, technical, creative and communal into a single coherent engagement model. immedia is experimenting with interesting results in this space and it has been rewarding to see the re-animation of old and young radio dogs when presented with tools that begin to offer glimmers of what this future might be.

Kelly Pringle presents a workshop on online brand building to the cast of Imbewu: The Seed, a Durban production by Videovision Entertainment that premieres this month on eTV.

Somewhere along the way, in all this cloud and mobile madness, we have been carrying time machines around in our pockets. Now they are making us anticipative. Will it happen now? What will happen next? It’s happening because dots are being joined and patterns identified and we are now used to these connections providing us useful information at ever faster rates. So now, there’s an anxiety you feel even though often you don’t know it. It’s the feeling you get when you have sent a message and you are waiting for a reply. The feeling you get when you are waiting for those three dots or “someone is typing…” to turn into a reply you can analyse and process. Happiness turns on the outcome. There’s banter so a companionable evening is on the cards; someone’s getting married so there’s slack to be taken up, the pug’s on the run again, the new gadget is on the way! Knowledge dawns on the outcome – and suddenly it’s #MeToo. Sometimes it’s insight and you learn something. Mostly though, it creates a shared connection. I belong. I am connected. I am not alone. It feeds the biggest anxiety we have in our lives.  The answer to the offer, “Come, take my hand.” Do I trust you? We have been talking about the effect that this digital journey has been making on our society and our opportunities here in Africa for some time. 22 years ago immedia adopted a guiding philosophy – that the future is converged and includes both the art AND science, the humans and tools that digital would elevate our lives to the real-time and in doing so eliminate lag, while infusing personality blooming into a new human age. In this new human age there would arise in the real-time a shared context a shared conversation a shared choreography Fuelled by the currency of trust and the foundation of community.  With the explosion of personality and the efficiency of information processing, humans can now at the same time be a part of many more communities than in the previous analogue era, because we can manage many more simultaneous connections. Because I can express myself at much higher fidelity now and much lower energy cost than ever before. My digital doppelgänger is my amplifier, my proxy, me. Which is why driving those communities, as ever, will be human conversation and human opinion.  And if, in your community, organisation, business or bike club you can’t keep up with the speed of social, you are losing.  Because those three dots … rule us now. Until you reply I can’t move forward and waiting for the other end of the connection to acknowledge transmission is probably the most primal of human anxieties. I am not alone. Until those three dots resolve into data, time seems elastic, time flows around it and is defined by it. The longest time in the world is waiting for three dots to complete so you can continue.  But an hour later it seems like you were talking for just a moment. Three dots to data and the data needs a reply, the loop needs to be closed, a human connection needs to be made. When all the world’s an algorithm, what’s the point of being human? To be more human. To build the compassionate and kind value system that allows all to apply ourselves to purpose and expression. Our collective mission now is to make better humans so we empower each other, we give dignity to each other, we give service to each other. Trump has been a metastasising and pure distillation of all the core ID of the past.  It’s like meeting a level boss who seems to be the big boss but turns out to be quite simply to dismiss once you work him out.  We have been merrily zipping along and thinking Trump was just another boss.  But he is a real-time virus creating a denial of service on human systems. I recently saw a headline “56 memorable quotes from Trumps WSJ interview”. 56! In an hour long interview.  You see what I mean? Not three or five or seven. 56! And memorable not for their insights but their world view or deviance from objective reality. The data bloom like an algae bloom and none of us can avoid being contaminated by it, like fallout. A lot of us have been focusing on the the building work of Fabrik and immedia and now it’s time to focus on the impact work.  On the “why do we do this”. Now you might have seen us grapple with that “what does it all mean” as we explored the thinking around the possible impact of a team like immedia and a product like Fabrik, if you looked up from your screen and saw a Mindshift. You would have heard us predict #MeToo and #HM and the real-time denial of service that is Donald Trump.  You feel the change in the air these days all over and in every aspect of life and global events seem to quickening the pace of change rather rapidly at the moment. I am a strong believer that change is coming because people are discovering a voice through digital. As with anything human, that voice is used for good, for bad – for constructive dialogue, for sowing confusion, to entertain and to spread division. Those voices are rising and suddenly everything is up for negotiation in the coming years and those voices in the marginalised edges are no longer excluded. We cannot continue to define economies and societies as successful because they work for the rich or privileged.  Successful human economies and societies work for everyone, especially those without a voice. Fabrik is just one of a wave of digital platforms that we hope will create the dialogue to build the future, entertain our people and inform our children. But it is the only one that has been built in Africa, by Africans, of a certain legacy. This is why I am so positive about our future. We offer you not just the platform, but the transplantation of this knowledge and methods to you through that legacy.

When we are called in to digitally transform a business into a data-driven organisation, we start by working to understand the drivers of trust and community building within that organisation. This approach is founded on a philosophy that the fundamental challenge for a business going forward is to build sufficiently sustainable human systems using the technology that we have at hand. If you consider the explosion of data that digitisation has caused through the aperture of the speed of which that data is now being transmitted, it has accelerated so rapidly that this data explosion has effectively overwhelmed the filters that enable our society to derive authority, trust & belief – filters that were long ago created by human systems. It seems that, post the ‘Information Age’, we have created a situation where there are a whole lot of people who don’t understand how the digital systems work and operate, and we find the trust has been eroded in many of the areas where technology should actually work to create outcomes. To win back the trust of the people we empower through technology, technology providers need to seriously consider: how do we treat data with dignity? To start with, we need to ensure that there’s equity in the participation of how that data might be used or enriched so that people understand the choices that they’re making when they participate. There shouldn’t just be a case of a one-sided view of that data and its application. In the creation of tools for our own people and our clients’ people, we come to it from a more humanist angle – we believe that there are a number of clear issues that are beginning to surface in the way humans exchange data, the usage of that data, and the value systems that are being affected by that data. There’s a lot of static in the air, and that comes from the fact that, to effectively talk about becoming a data-driven organisation, it means first becoming a digital organisation. One of the things organisations have got to do is have the courage to change, and part of that change is having the courage to sweat the little things. When you are in possession of data, it means that you will discover 10 things you can do something about. Being a data-driven organisation means, you actually have to look at all of those 10 things. The only way to do that effectively is to very rapidly broaden and open up the aperture of information processing through the organisation – which happens to be your people. In the technology industry, management systems have had to change from the traditional hierarchical drop-down model to a more collaboration-driven, agile, rapidly “twisting time” model. The challenge with doing that properly is that you don’t have time to send it upstairs so someone else can make a decision – every person has to have both the courage and the accountability to ‘get on with it’. There therefore has to be a strong sense of trust in that environment and trust in the data flow. And this is why most organisations pause right there. Overcoming the next challenge means having the courage to diversify your data set and information flow. Adopting the markers of that change requires rewiring the entire business and empowering other voices. So they choose to focus on iterating process instead of people. The problem for us as human-focused digital transformation consultants is that this outcome of organisations choosing to fixate on digitising process rather than empowering people, comes from our own frustrations. The fundamental point of departure is (and Arthur C Clarke put it best): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”! Now here I come as a data scientist or a technologist or a data-driven individual to tell an organisation, “The data says that if you want to be an effective team, you’ve got to start by throwing away these prejudices you currently have in your organisation about who you think is effective and at what.” And “Now you better believe me and you better trust me because that is the only thing you have to go on because the rest of it you will only understand after this pivotal shift in mindset” – it’s indistinguishable from magic. For us, the pattern is obvious. And that’s our challenge as a technology industry. Because we have not yet created an equitable, transparent, participatory culture around what we do with people’s data, we haven’t exactly covered ourselves in glory, when it comes to trust. How do we go about building that trust? We’ve got to put some new topics on the table – the things that have not been talked about, that need to be talked about. That’s only going to come, if we truly want to be inclusive, from an emerging market perspective; from teams that are currently dealing with these realities. Part of that is the willingness to listen when those far corners of the “data pool” speak up on the unintended consequences that an uninformed technology practice can lead to. For example, Facebook has a habit of testing algorithms in, I guess what they would call ’emerging markets’. Sounds harmless, an approach to testing within a data set. To me this sounds a lot like: “Hey, let’s experiment in this third-world country, before taking this new feature larger.” I personally think the data set in downtown Palo Alto is more diverse and denser than the entire country of Namibia. The thing is they don’t choose to run this test of their algorithm in downtown Paulo Alto – they run it in the entire country of Namibia. And the question we’ve got to ask ourselves becomes: “So… if this algorithm causes some kind of damage or lack of trust in communities because fake news starts getting injected, etc. etc. … Then what?!” As it turns out was the case. But what about this human collateral damage we’re leaving behind? And who said we can do that anyway, actually? And that comes down to when we are modelling this data and when we are gathering this data, are we looking at this as people, as humans, first?

This month, we've released major improvements to the existing functionality! Support for segmented recordings (pause/resume). Reliability improvements to live audio streaming. Reliability improvements to Audio Archiving. Better handling of unexpected client disconnection. We now allow for small gaps in audio when creating recordings.

Phil Molefe represents the Fabrik team live on-air on Izwi LoMzansi’s drive-time show, engaging in conversation with presenter MaFresh and Futhi Khumalo around the community station’s month-old app and its benefits for listeners. If you’re not catching this live on the Izwi LoMzansi Android or iPhone app, listen to the podcast on-demand!

Originally posted in Isolezwe. Selizotholakala naphesheya kwezilwandle isiteshi somphakathi saseThekwini esikhula ngesikhulu isivinini. Izwi Lomzansi FM elitholakala eDurban Station, izolo lethule i-App yalo okuwubuchwepheshe besimanje obusebenza ngeselula. Le App etholakala kwi-internet ebizwa ngokuthi Izwi98FM eyenziwe abe-Immedia. Umphathi wezinhlelo kulo msakazi uFuthi Khumalo, uthe ucwaningo lwabo luveze ukuthi sebewu-43% abalaleli beZwi Lomzansi asebebalalela kule App eqale ukuba khona kuleli sonto. Izolo bebeyethula ngokusemthethweni. EGoli kuvele ukuthi yisona esihamba phambili ngoba iningi labantu abahambela iTheku balalela lo msakazo ngesikhathi belinde amabhasi nezitimela esiteshini. “Lolu hlobo lobuchwepheshe bese kuyisikhathi sokuthi silusebenzise ngoba abantu abaningi bakhala ngokuthi kukhona lapho umsakazo ungafiki khona. Abalaleli abaningi baseGoli besize sixhumane nabo ngokusebenzisana nomunye umsakazo. Uma sesitholakala kwiselula, kuzoba lula kakhulu ukuthi sixhumane nabo nakwezinye izifundazwe. Okuhle ukuthi ngisho abantu bephesheya kwezilwandle bazoqhubeka nokuzithola zonke izinhlelo zethu baphinde baphawule nangazo kalula,” kusho uKhumalo. Umphathi siteshi, uVela Xulu, uthe inhloso yabo enkulu ukwenza lo msakazo usebenze njengeminye emikhulu yize kungowomphakathi. “Sifuna ukuzakhela amathuba emisebenzi sibenzise intsha eyazi kangcono ngobuchwehesheye, ezokumaketha, ukusakaza nezokuxhumana. Noma siwumsakazo omncane kodwa akukho esifuna abalaleli bashode kukho. “Esikhathini samanje zonke izinto zenziwa ngobuchwepheshe yikho sinyusa izinga,” kusho uXulu. Omunye wabasakazi oseneminyaka kulesi siteshi uNontobeko Mbelu, uthe ukufika kwale App kwenze indlela yokuxhumana nabalaleli yalula kakhulu. “Konke sesikwenza ngekhasi elilodwa abalaleli sebeyakwazi ngisho ukusithumelela ama-voicenote,” kusho uNontobeko. Omunye wongqondongqondo bale App, * -Anice Hassim we-Immedia ebhekelele ukusebenza kwale App, uthe ayikho imininingwane ezoduka. UHassim uthe konke kuzoba lula kubalaleli ngoba bazokwazi nokulalela umsakazo noma bengekho emakhaya. “Umuntu uzokwazi ukuqopha izinhlelo azithandayo abuye azilalele uma ethola isikhathi. “Uma kukhulunywa ngesihloko wangezwa kahle, uzokwazi ukuphinde ubuyele emuva ulalelisise,” kusho Hassim.

Originally posted on balancing act. Africa’s broadcasters are facing a legion of challenges and need to find new ways to connect with their audiences to build loyalty. In a world awash with mobile internet and social media they need to be able find new ways of working that will change things. Russell Southwood looks at two African innovations – Fabrik and Volume News – that might help breed a better-connected broadcast media. Africa’s TV channels do not have the reach of radio or mobile, although it is probably the latter that poses the greater threat. Africans can sit on buses in the traffic listening to FM radio or watching online content. They can check their phones during the day for breaking news and watch clips recommended by their friends on their lunch break. The speed of social media often means that news is often no longer on the hour but seems to happen in real time. Furthermore the discussion about news and issues of the day – particularly for the young – happens more often than not on social media. These discussions also start trending extremely quickly and often even those with live phone-ins seem to get left behind. In this issue I’m going to focus on two innovations: one is a media platform that helps create social engagement with your audiences and is not as its creator South African Anice Hassim, Immedia puts it:”Fabrik is not just about management and workflows.” For example, it enables a radio station to have a digital presence that can do four things: it has personality; it eliminates time-lag in getting information out; it enhances ways of telling the story; and provides a shared context. Talk radio audiences were social media before social media existed but they were not easily able to track what their most engaged users felt. So whereas analog audiences are “spray and pray”, the platform allows you (through analysing all your social media through an app) to spot sub-sets of people interested in particular issues or topics. Indeed through the app, viewers or listeners can choose to get alerts on particular topics. A regular caller to a talk show can become a contributor:”The audience’s voice begins to blend with the station’s voice.” Audiences can either engage directly through the station’s app or through social media that the app allows the station to see all in one place. Furthermore, the TV or radio station can use it to quantify their online reach:”There are revenue opportunities in the platform. Stations can put their online reach on the rate card and get a share of that revenue. The higher the engagement, the more they can monetise.” I shall return in a future issue to look in greater detail at the Fabrik platform. The second media innovation comes out of the JAMLAB is a programme of Wits Journalism and the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering in partnership with Ryerson University, Toronto and Journalists for Human Rights. The project aims to support more and better innovation in journalism and media on the continent. It is based in one of Africa’s newest innovation hubs, Tshimologong in a downtown area of Johannesburg called Braamfontein. Volume News was one of six start-ups making its first pitch before an invited audience on Wednesday. Its stated goal is to create a new mobile-first news wire service that links community radio journalists with mainstream news outlets to breakthrough the existing metropolitan filter bubble of South African news coverage. It calculates that there are 9 million people who are not getting local news. It wants to do this by creating local stories in local languages. It wants to create local stories that will be broadcast through trusted local community news stations in South Africa. Currently only 14% of the news these stations broadcast despite their rationale being one of addressing local audiences. It wants to create a team of local journalists throughout the country that they will submit using an app and it will supply an app to radio stations (that will also use a simple Raspberry Pi device) that will allow them to easily use the stories generated in an MP3 format. These local journalists become known as the person to go to if you want to get something on air. It is currently generating stories that are reaching 200,000 people but its medium term ambition is to reach 1.5 million listeners through 85 stations. The service potentially has a direct impact on the financial fortunes of community radio stations. Volume News said that community radio stations get 25% of audiences but only 2% of advertising spend. This is partly because the brands and NGOs that might use them have no idea whether their information or ad is transmitted. The station tool it has built allows this to be tracked. Neither of these two ideas are the complete answer to all of the woes of Africa’s radio and TV stations but both contain ideas that might allow channel owners to compete more effectively and build audience loyalty using modern methods.