FCM Forum this Saturday, Sept. 16, 4-5:30 PM KKFI Annex Room, 39th & Main Rear Door. Spencer Graves has set up an agenda which will include two items:
1. Reports back from people’s efforts to contact their representatives in the US House and Senate regarding net neutrality.
2. Planning for a monthly webinar series on media and democracy to be cosponsored by the Friends of Community Media (FCM) and the United Minority Media Association (UMMA). Per the draft minutes of an UMMA meeting earlier today (below), UMMA may meet on the third Saturdays at 10 AM in the KKFI Annex. This webinar / Forum series might be scheduled to begin after that, e.g. at noon or 11 AM or 11:30 AM. In July and August, we met later in the day. These webinars could be live streamed on Facebook and subsequently offered on WorkingJournalistPress.com, broadcasted on KKFI and offered to the Pacifica network of ~200 listener-sponsored radio stations. With luck, we may be able to get FreePress.net and other groups concerned with media reform to co-sponsor later episodes of the webinar series. We have expressions of interest from the following three, who could do webinars for us Oct. 21, Nov. 18, and Dec. 16, not necessarily in this order:
2.1. Lewis Friedland, professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin and author of important publications on media and democracy (https://journalism.wisc.edu/sjmc_profile/lewis-a-friedland/).
2.2. Rev. Timothy Hayes, Jr., the Interim President of the United Minority Media Association (UMMA), who is 25 years old and has built a church on social media and can likely help us replicate that success in improving media and democracy here in the greater Kansas City area — and the world.
2.3. David Barsamian, founder and director of Alternative Radio, a Boulder, Colorado-based syndicated weekly public affairs program heard on some 250 radio stations worldwide. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Barsamian).
For more on Spencer Graves’ thoughts on the webinar series, see “https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Webinars_on_media_and_democracy”. For more on my thoughts regarding the afflictions that humanity inflicts upon itself, see“https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_and_%27Restoring_Internet_freedom%27” and “https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Winning_the_War_on_Terror”.