FOSS Advocacy for West Africa and Beyond

On May 14th and May 15th a group of sixteen West African journalists has attended a two day training course in audio editing and radio broadcasting in Accra, Ghana using FOSS applications. The course was one of the pre-conference training sessions organised for the fourth edition of Idlelo, the African conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons organised every two years by FOSSFA.

The participants had the opportunity to learn how to work with applications like Audacity and Campcaster, the first free and open radio management software, providing live studio broadcast capabilities as well as the remote automation in one integrated system.

The session focused on strengthening their skills in producing and editing digital radio broadcasts. The training course was organised by FOSSWAY project, in collaboration with Sierra eRiders.

The trainees were radio professionals and journalists from six West African countries: Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leon, Mali, Togo and Benin. They divided their time between theoretical training and practical exercises. Most of them didn't know about Free and Open Source Software before the training and showed sincere enthusiasm and interest in adopting FOSS applications in their work and free time.

About the software applications tought suring the training:

Audacity is a free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and BSD.

Campcaster is a free and open source automation system for radio stations. It provides live studio broadcast capabilities as well as remote automation in one integrated system. Campcaster has been developed by an international consortium of developers and designers led by the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), at its Center for Advanced Media Prague (CAMP) as part of its Campware Initiative.

The scalability of Campcaster allows implementation in a number of use scenarios, ranging from an unmanned broadcast unit accessed from remote through the Internet to a local network of Campcaster machines inside a radio station handling live broadcasts and delivering program automation by accessing a central audio storage system.