Grassroots media training/KKFI

This article exists to facilitate collaborative development and use of a training curriculum that hopefully will become a regular part of how KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio, pursues its mission. We hope to do this by offering classes that increase both the skill level of our volunteers and the number of volunteers. The increased skill should improve the quality of what we broadcast. And that increase in quality as well as a presumed increase in the number of volunteers would both likely help increase our audience. The increase in quality, volunteers and audience should also help increase our funding, which should make it easier for us to produce even better training and broadcasts, in a virtuous cycle.

It is on Wikiversity to invite anyone interested to contribute in any way they feel may help KKFI or may be useful from some similar organization.

KKFI currently offers “New Volunteer Orientation” and classes in podcasting. The following summarizes more of our pressing training needs:

• Audacity (audio editor): In an informal survey of KKFI training needs, the largest call seemed to be for Audacity, which is Free and open-source software (FOSS) that seems to provide everything KKFI needs in terms of audio editing. KBOO, a listener-sponsored radio station in Portland, Oregon, has an aggressive training program that includes Adobe Audition for audio editing. However, Adobe Audition is commercial software. If most of KKFI's audio editing were by people who did that more or less every day, it might be easy to justify the use of commercial software. However, KKFI is primarily concerned with inspiring volunteers to edit one audio file each quarter or even one each week, and enabling those people to produce quality audio that says what they want with a reasonable effort. Audacity can fill that need with the help of the training we plan to provide for this.

Beyond that, KKFI needs people who are capable of managing the production of, for example, All Souls Forum, for which we do not currently have a volunteer committed to edit the recording each week, enter it into our PAL software, and create the episode description to appear on KKFI's web site. For this we will eventually also need documentation and training for the following:

• KKFI Program Associate: KKFI currently has an exam for “program associate,” as described in KKFI's Programmers Policy & Operations Manual. KKFI needs a class that would cover the contents of this manual and prepare people to take the program associate exam.

• Entering an audio file into the PAL software system that KKFI uses to traffic the recorded material we broadcast.

• Creating and updating episode descriptions on KKFI.org.

These latter two classes should follow the Program Associate training, because KKFI doesn't want just anyone doing these tasks without demonstrating a certain skill level and commitment to maintaining high quality standards in what we broadcast. We don't want, for example, just anyone messing with our sensitive production equipment nor our web site.

Discussions of other possible training offerings will be added in the future.