PhonePeti

Abstract

Community Radio (CR) stations are short range radio stations that serve the local media needs of their surrounding communities. Community participation by way of helping set the station agenda, airing of people's voices, and providing them with a local communication medium, is the defining feature of CR. But this philosophy has been hard to execute in practice because of logistical difficulties, with station staff not being able to reach out to a listenership-base spread across several hundreds of square kilometers. In today's context though, the high penetration of mobile phones has made it easier for listeners to participate in the running of radio stations, but the potential of telephony and radio integration has been exploited only minimally. In this paper, we explore the use of PhonePeti, an automated answering machine system in a community radio station based in Gurgaon, India. Answering machines are one of several ways to bring together the radio and telephony mediums. We show that this alone has the potential to considerably improve community engagement, but it also opens up many interesting issues on usability. Through quantitative and content analysis of 758 calls from 411 callers over two iterations of PhonePeti, combined with telephonic interviews of several callers, we show that significant challenges arise in being able to explain the concept of an answering machine to people who have not been exposed to a similar system in the past. We then show, through call statistics, that PhonePeti has increased community engagement by enabling more listeners to reach the station. Finally, we show that an answering machine system can be used to collect useful information from the callers.