So much of what we see and hear about Africa gets filtered through an American or Western lens. One of the great gifts of the "world wide web" and the age of the global internet is that we can seek and find and hear authentic and unmediated voices that connect us to other cultures.

Thanks to the Waves For Change blog, I discovered Durban Sings, a fascinating project from South Africa that is creating a platform for oral history, community engagement, cultural celebration.

Durban Sings invites contributions of raw audio to an open source archive of sounds, and then asks artists and activists around the world to dip into it and "remix" African history using the voices of the people, and the pulse of the community.  Check this out: 

Durban Sings is facilitated by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu Natal. Eight editorial collectives in communities around Durban are recording and uploading interviews and ambiences through the end of March, 2010. 

At AIR, we like to say that MQ2 was "taking public media to the streets." Durban Sings is taking the streets to public media, or making public media from the streets. 

More and more nonprofit organizations are using digital media to tell stories about the people they serve, and engage us in advocacy campaigns. Thanks to the Lost Remote, a blog that "covers the exploding local media space, from hyperlocal news to location-aware mobile," I share this provocative project from the streets of New York City. 

Those of us living in urban America likely cross paths with homeless people on a daily basis. Do you stop and offer to help? Give money or buy food? Do you have a policy of only giving to women or disabled people or folks who don't seem to be using drugs? Do you have a conversation, ask their names, hear their story? Do you avert your eyes and rush off to catch the bus, get to work, check email or send a tweet?

The painful truth is that each encounter is ultimately an ethical dilemma that questions our humanity. Homeless people are us. Yet, somehow, most of "us" have found a way to ignore them on both a personal and societal level. They wander through our streets like ghosts, recognized by the rare, sensitive among us tuned in to their frequency. This is what came to mind for me as I watched the public digital installation below.

Why go to Harvard when you can get smart super-fast just watching this TED Talk by Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig? It's a fascinating romp through the politics of fair use and the "ecology of creativity."

The makers of The Corner, radio producer Jenny Asarnow and documentary photographer Inye Wokoma, are pushing out a new project called 206 Black – The Diaspora.  Diaspora is a powerful word meaning dispersal. It’s been used to describe the movement (usually involuntary) of people from their homelands: Jews, Palestinians, Africans, and others.

206 Black is a social media/multimedia project that aims to collect the stories of African Americans who used to live in the Central District, the neighborhood that Wokoma says was once the “center of gravity” for the Seattle's black community. 

Wokoma's stunning, larger-than-life portraits of Central District residents were featured both in the public art installation at 23rd & Union and on the Corner website. Wokoma has lived in the Central District for most of his life. He raised two teens in that neighborhood and now lives with his wife and 3 year old  “in the home that has been in the family for decades.” Wokoma says he also “owns another that was the first purchased by my grandfather back in 1948.”

The past few weeks, I've been participating in a series of live twitter chats between a diversity of public media makers and thinkers. These chats have been happening on Monday nights at 8 pm ET using the hashtag #pubmedia. (Join us!).

Twitter probably isn't the best way to have a group discussion of this sort, given the 140 character word limit. But there are positives: it is egalitarian, spotaneous, public and attributed. Plus, the "conversations" have been interesting. We've tweeted about investments in social media, asked who in public media is "getting it right," how we might better collaborate with "like-minded" journalists and non-profits, etc.

This week's Twitterbash about impact measurement was led by Jessica Clark, co-author of Beyond the Echo Chamber. She is helping assess and evaluate the impact of MQ2 projects. During the chat, I raised this question:

This American Life: How do we love thee? Let me count the ways: 60,000 apps downloaded from the iPhone store in the first month! At $2.99 a pop, that means the TAL-app developed by PRX is well on its way to being a bestseller and a healthy, respectable source of revenue.

And who would expect anything else? Ira Glass is a public media rock star. Once upon a time, when I told people I worked in public radio, they would ask, “Do you know Terry Gross?” Nowadays, it’s always Ira, Ira, Ira.

Scott Simon might have more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter (myself included) but who else in public radio has inspired pillows and tattoos, possible graffiti and blogs like “Dear Ira Glass?”

Tomorrow is Ruth Seymour's last day as General Manager of KCRW, the eclectic, hip NPR station she's led for more than three decades. An event honoring her last night at the Getty Museum brought together station staff, community leaders and public radio people, including AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt, who captured this video of Ruth's parting words. Ruth is preceded by Warren Olney (To the Point), KCRW's Sarah Spitz, and David Bomford of the Getty.

How can public radio build on its success, better serve its current audience, and reach an even larger segment of the U.S. population? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting wants to know. So, they turned to Tom Thomas and Terry Clifford of the Station Resource Group, two of the big brains behind public radio, and asked them to lead the effort. They engaged a Public Radio Audience Growth Task Force, consulted with a veritable Who's Who of Public Radio Influentials and published their findings last month in a report called "Public Radio in the New Network Age." Have you read it?

I have to admit, in this era of 140-character tweets, RSS feeds and distracted web surfing, a 95-page report (even on a topic I care about) seems like a commitment bordering on marriage. Fortunately, they catered to the special needs of the attention deficient among us and produced a summary of recommendations that's only 12 pages. If you care about the future of public radio, there's no excuse not to read the whole thing.

"Welcome to The [Un]Observed, a Radio Magazine of candid conversations and explorations, works in sound and produced pieces from around the world. We're exploring the intimate, and sometimes surprising, moments of art, culture and life."

The [Un]Observed is a new launch and very promising start-up by MQ2 finalist Tania Ketenjian. The site is like a delicious mouthful of rich, dark chocolate - a sensual treat that elicits feelings of happiness and satisfaction, a sampler to savor, worth every calorie consumed. The [Un]Observed features some truly interesting and unusual audio art, sound poems and stories. Many of these pieces have aired or appeared elsewhere, but this new platform unearths them from the archives, revives and refreshes them, giving them a second life.

Earlier this month, the National Center for Media Engagement hosted a webinar to share the innovative models of MQ2 with public radio and public television stations across the country. More than 130 people in the public media world registered for this hour-long online event, which featured AIR Executive Director Sue Schardt, KUOW's Jenny Asarnow of The Corner: 23rd & Union, and Kara Oehler of Mapping Main Street. If you missed it, you can catch the whole thing which is archived right here.

Thanks to Anne Wilder, Bryce Kirchoff, Charles Meyer and everyone else at NCME who helped make this Webinar a success. 

As usual, there were more questions than time would allow. We agreed to gather up the unanswered inquiries and do our best to provide responses. If you haven't watched the Webinar, I suggest you do that before reading the Q & A below. Questions are in bold. Answers are in italics.