Subscribe to Optaros RSS feedIn creating :Vocalo, the folks at Chicago Public Radio weren't just trying to create a new website for a radio station. They were trying to create an entirely new experience, which would enable an online community and help CPR reconnect with a geographic community which was underserved.
As Torey Malatia put it, in this article in the Current:
There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
He goes on to explain that the community arose out of a very lengthy process of evaluating the disconnects between the audience (and membership) of WBEZ and the actual physical population of the areas they served. How could Chicago Public Radio claim to be truly community radio if the audience was only a small portion of the actual community?
Malatia's description of the connections between the online community and the local physical community is worth quoting at length:
Though the Internet is known for creating communities that transcend geography, it is local radio broadcasting that connects us to the places we live, work, participate in society and become citizens. That’s important because geographic place is citizenship’s universe. Only place allows for citizenship.
Just because online communities can be designed and planned to "transcend geography" doesn't mean that they can't also be used to deepen the sense of community in specific places. :Vocalo is an interesting experiment in many ways, but I think the most interesting is in its attempt to join the local offline experience to the global online one.