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Dinningtom Area Regeneration Trust
Dinnington Area Regeneration Trust Case Study
Dinnington Area Regeneration Trust used the TUTV funding to support a pilot community webcasting service, including training for a group of 10 volunteers to produce and broadcast content on a weekly basis.
John Welch, Project Manager writes:
The original remit of the project was to provide an audio only service to the local community, in the form of a community radio station. This has been achieved with the building of a radio studio in the DART Training Centre. The studio is used by members of the Dinnington community to create content for webcasting either via streaming or podcasting. When working with the local community groups the feedback that we received from them was that the ability to create video content would be an advantage for the groups. This was particularly true of the Dinnington and District History Society who have a number of interviews with locals spanning a 25 year period. As a way of them creating revenue to support their research they had paid for a number of these video interviews to be turned into DVDs which they then sell. They have a large amount of content that is still to be turned into DVDs so they approached us with the request that they would like to be able to create the DVDs themselves if we could provide the necessary editing and production facility. To this end we extended the project to incorporate the facilities for video recording, editing and DVD production. We purchased two digital camcorders to enable other members of the community and community groups to create video content. The community has taken this to their hearts with the creation of both audio and video content for the project. This has included music from local bands, self help radio programmes as well as video of local events such as youth football matches.
Between September and November we ran a series of events on a Tuesday evening for the local community and any others that were interested in the use of technology in the community. These events ranged from introductions to web technologies, through to the creation of content and webcasting. In October we also ran a series of four events specific to the webcasting project, which covered the creation of audio and video content and how to deliver the content through streaming and podcasting (including vodcasting for video).
Our primary target audience for the webcasts is Dinnington and the surrounding communities. This group have access to the service via a wireless network provided under the Dinnington.net project. Unfortunately, due to technical issues with the service we have been unable to achieve a successful service during the period of the project. We are currently working to resolve the issues with this so that we can target the content to the local community. We are also working to create additional extensions to the Dinnington.net website to link in with the webcasting service. To allow for the webcasting of content to the rest of the Internet, we have become members of the CMA allowing us access to the streaming and podcasting servers. This has enabled us to start the streaming of content via podcasts.
One of the main aims of the Dinnington Regeneration project is to enable the use of technology by communities. To achieve this, as part of the webcasting project, we are working with open-source software as much as possible to keep the cost to the community to a minimum. The video editing suite is running Linux and using the Cinelerra video editing software. This provides us with professional quality editing whilst keeping the costs to a minimum. For the recording studio we have also used Linux as the base operating system and for editing the audio content a number of tools have been provided including Audacity. By ensuring the use of open-source software and recycled PC/s (in the studio) we have demonstrated that community groups can create and stream content with the minimum of cost.
