Community Media/KRUU FM

KRUU's Mission
KRUU-FM's mission is to give Fairfield, Iowa a voice and strengthen the community by encouraging creativity, dialogue and community involvement. KRUU is an open, inclusive, diverse forum for music, creative expression, information, and entertainment. It is a non-commercial, non-profit, community-supported low-power radio station with a strong emphasis on locally created and produced programming.

We also feel, as Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! recently told station manager James Moore in an interview, that the antidote to corporate globalization is local mobilization. In that sense, we love the idea of combining hyper local with global community radio; and take our tagline 'The Voice of Fairfield, Iowa... and Beyond' very seriously.

KRUU's Technology Overview
KRUU's technology team has a strong commitment to the philosophies and values at the core of the Free Culture movement and underlying the Free/Open Source Software movement. This commitment stems from the technology team gaining much of their computing knowledge from experimentation (aka hacking).

Using Free/Open Source Software often focuses on the Free (as in beer) part. KRUU's use of Free Software is more importantly tied to freedom: the freedom to customize the code; the freedom to distribute our changes to the community; and the freedom to help others learn from our experimentation. This was motivated by the fact that KRUU's recording equipment, formerly ProTools hardware and software, could not be customized to our needs. Moreover since KRUU is community radio, which is necessarily amateur, we wished to be able to have a set of tools which would be available to all our hosts and could be modified and re-packaged as needs arose.

In very simple terms Community Media requires Free/Open Source Software.

[KRUU's technical implementation] is based largely on using simple solutions which contribute to people learning, rather than monolithic automated solutions.

KRUU's Press Accolades
Shortly after we began broadcasting in September 2006, a London-based writer named Richard Poynder wrote in his blog about KRUU's "open radio" revolution, notwithstanding the limits of obtaining FCC licensing in the US.

In the May 2007 issue of of Linux Journal, senior editor Doc Searls wrote in a short piece titled "KRUU Models Open Source Radio": "I listen to a lot of radio on-line and I don't know of a station that's more commited to free software and open-source values than this little station... I listen to it in Santa Barbara and its already one of my faves."

KRUU runs Ubuntu a Free community-created and community-supported operating system, as an alternative to proprietary systems such as Windows, on all station desktops. KRUU is one of seven case studies/success stories on Ubuntu's website highlighting the OS's applied value.

KRUU and the Commonwealth of Learning
KRUU was contacted by members of the Commonwealth of Learning (who run WikiEducator.org) to collaborate on encouraging implementation of community media based on Free/Open Source principles.

KRUU-LP 100.1 FM

The Voice of Fairfield, Iowa

www.kruufm.com

Open Educational Resources (list)

 * KRUU Book on WikiEducator
 * Volunteer Agreement
 * Volunteer Handbook
 * HR/Volunteer Performance Appraisal / Evaluation

Page Links & Projects

 * Ideas (originating from July 9, 2008 conference call)
 * The Bonnell Project
 * Free Speech Radio News