 Hello there, it's Thursday at noon. I know it is Do you remember our arrangement Thursdays at noon on CFUV Are you ready to get started? What do you have in mind? What I want to do now is called first-person plural You make it sound excessively attractive That's what I have in mind One year ago tomorrow May 9th the first episode of first-person plural was aired on CFUV FM Here in Victoria, British Columbia today We celebrate our one-year anniversary by keeping the plural part of the show honest with a panel discussion First-person plural is based upon the simple idea that events in our daily lives occur within the context of our Relationships to other people what each of us does is important for his or her own life But it is also important for the lives of others We make history together and as such our destinies are intertwined with each other No better example of this beautiful complexity can be made than a community-based approach to health the biomedical model focuses on diseases Interacted by individuals health However can mean much more than not being sick and can involve much more than Individual behavior community-based approaches to health and health promotion research regard cultural and social factors to be important to personal health development of community resources is as important in this approach as Vaccinations and antibiotics are the members of our panel today are playing important roles in a Victoria based Project in the Hillside Quadra and North Park neighborhoods Concentrating on the prevention of chronic conditions that tend to start in midlife That is 35 to 64 years of age Promoting action toward health or a path is a research Project that is taking a community-based approach to health issues in their second year of work path is currently Facilitating a community kitchen community garden low-impact exercise classes and community mapping designed to understand community resources and Community history this five-year effort is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and is as much about Research as it is about health promotion the term Community-based research is broadly used and has varying degrees of grassroots involvement The basic principle behind most of the work that uses the term however is that Information gathering and knowledge production must have some connection with and must give back something to the community being studied This is easier said than done taking this approach becomes a balancing act of the community's needs Along with the desire to publish research results and the demands of funding sources used to more traditional models of research First person plural is a show focused on how groups including communities are formed and sustained We are a spoken word show produced on community radio It seems appropriate on this first anniversary of our show to take some time to think about Community and how social research relates to and supports communities We hope you will enjoy our panel discussion today as we examine community and reflect upon our roles in promoting community In an episode we call when our paths cross Thank each of you again for agreeing to be here today. I want to start off with each of you telling me your name and What you're part of the project entails I'm Doug Rhodes. I chair the Hillside Quadra neighborhood action group and our part of the project is as a community association Co-operating with and benefiting from the study I'm Laura Funk. I'm the research coordinator on the path project and my role entails things like data collection it for instance the survey we did of residents of the Community and as well as to some dissemination efforts of that information back to the community and on just ongoing other ongoing data collection throughout the Project and my name is Debbie Pierce and I'm the community coordinator Which means that I work with individuals and groups in the community to identify what kind of initiatives We might get going to try to improve the health of the community I've heard the word community already today, and it's a very powerful word I think I'd like to ask each of you how you would define or describe What community is or how it might be defined or described well community in this sense is Defined officially by the city according to an area of land, but that's only one way of thinking about a community other ways of thinking about it would Revolve around people's interests and mutual interests for example People in a similar socioeconomic group might have similar needs or similar problems And they might come together to try to solve those problems as a group and that might be a community and of course today with the The internet and so on we have virtual communities that have no relationship at all to geography So as we think about communities I think we need to go beyond the notion of people who happen to live beside each other or even people who happen to be doing the same things for whatever reasons and we need to look for some element of Commonality or some element of people trying to do something that's bigger than themselves and As an example there might be two people who live in the same community They drive to the same area every day. They suffer the same traffic congestion every day And they might even have the same response to that they might be going to a meeting or writing a letter At that point I don't think we have community. I think we have parallelism For it to become a community people I think would need to recognize That they share with each other some of these concerns and begin to think about how they might work together To address them. So when I think about community, I think about intentional ism. There needs to be some intent to Create something larger than yourself. There needs to be a sense of a common wealth if you like that we all contribute to And it's more than just private people doing what they would have done anyway And doing it together One thing that we asked people on the survey was if a group of people in an area Don't have a sense of community or sense of belonging to one another Can you really say that that's a community if they have other similarities? Also, we asked people about one thing that came suggestions that came back where people thought there needed to be more of a sense of community developed in their neighborhood and for them that entailed things like they wanted to get to know their neighbors better and Have that idea where you and your neighbors look out for one another that kind of feeling it to me is a sense of community in it In a neighborhood or a defined geographic area. Yeah, and I agree what you guys have said But I also think community is also based on interest. That's kind of what you were talking about Doug And there's has to be some intentionality there and that's one of the challenges I think of this project is that we're working within a geographically defined area But within that there's all sorts of different communities not just neighborhoods But there's various ethnic communities. There are People who don't really have a sense of belonging to a neighborhood community, but they have other communities in their life I mean, you know, it's not that they're disconnected totally, but they may not be connected to that community so it's a Creates a lot of challenges When you're really trying to build community around a geographic model And and for a research perspective perspective if you're trying to study community one of the things we've tried to grapple with is how do you define it and and for Research purposes you can often only really define it by that geographic thing Which is why I think a lot of people keep coming back to that but it's how do you? Gather information on these other communities. I think you need a lot of Sort of new and innovative research methods to do that We've talked about community. I guess partly having an aspect of things in common So things that people share and we've talked a little bit about intention or Perception if you like and people perceiving themselves as part of the community And I think that brings in a whole question of a public private split The I'm thinking of the recent book that that came out. It's called something like bowling alone and it's arguing that in America People are less community spirited and less community oriented that they once were Robert Putnam's book, right? I don't know if that argument to you know, well eventually prevail or not, but it's an interesting question that says how Wealthy if I can put it that way not just in money, but in other senses how wealthy do we feel as a community? To what extent are people prepared to? You know make investments in the common benefit versus private benefit And if I go back again to a traffic example, there seems to be lots of money to buy fancy cars and SUVs and so on There seems to be no money to improve the public realm within which those vehicles operate So the the spectrum that I'm talking about I guess if a community is strong, however It's defined it is able to mobilize its resources financial and human and intellectual and social in order to achieve things That are common to everyone if a community is weak then private interests will try to achieve their own goals possibly even to the detriment of the rest of the community so that our group for example is defined around some Institutional things that relate to zoning and traffic and bylaws and land development and it's so it's very geographic in its definition And yet we recognize that there as Debbie has said are any number of communities that Overlap with or operate within our geographic area and sometimes the I think you've probably had some experience with this with the nag group is that there are Sometimes competing interests within communities There's lots of things that are shared, but there's different there are different socioeconomic layers within a community So if you take social housing for example, there may be some portion of the community that that Advocate for social housing because they can't ever afford to buy a house They can't even afford to rent and then there are other groups who can't afford to buy who may not want social housing in their Backyard because they may perceive that it creates traffic problems or there's more kids in the neighborhood than they want to have a They would if they had single-family dwellings and all sorts of other things So I think part of the challenge of community is How do you balance those interests and how do you bring people together to recognize that in spite of the fact that there are differences? We have to work together if we're going to live in a healthy environment. That's really a good example I am and you know if we think about Solving problems in quotes if someone sees run-down buildings and poor quality of housing as a problem in quotes One solution is to bring in people who have the income and the resources to fix up those buildings and make them nice Yeah, so so-called gentrification, right? So if we focus on the problem being look at those run-down buildings We've solved it if we focus on the problem as being how do people find a decent way to live in their community? Well, we've just got rid of all those Problem people yeah and replace them with others and and now everyone's happy because their property value is going up or something But really all we've done is displace From a community point of view that's more like an immune response You know to try to get rid of some aspect of the community and I would see that as destructive, right? You know reduces diversity and and it makes people feel less Welcome and belonging. That's some of the tension in the community development literature And even we found in our survey a number of people identified we asked them to identify things They liked and didn't like about their community and a lot of them didn't like the more visible You know issues of drug use and prostitution and that kind of thing That's an identified concern on the part of people but from a community development perspective. How do you deal with that? You know, do you If the majority of people want to push these other people out of there Do you go along with that or you know and the the whole tension between in community development? Some people say you have to develop a consensus in the community and then that's you have to agree upon a goal And that's good to in my view is the hardest thing to agree upon is that that goal and how to how to get there Other people say though that you need that conflict and a lot of discussion a lot of healthy discussion around the issues And that it what's that conflict that will lead to the more meaningful change Of course, that's this may be getting into another area, but that takes a lot of time to do that Right and most research projects are not set up to with a lot of time to be able to do that That's what makes ours kind of unique We do have some time to be able to actually work in the community and and try to build around some of those issues Yeah Well, what i'm hearing is that the word itself is informed by a taxonomy or rather how you define the word drives a taxonomy That in turn informs the research. I want to hit methodology more specifically now I'd like to hear from each of you or from all of you collectively a short description of what community research is And how it differs from more traditional traditional in quotes, please forms our research How is the methodology driven by this conception of community? And how is the method by which the conception is formed influential on the research methodology? I guess the first thing is that community-based research is about community. It's about people. It's about community So that's that's the first thing The second thing is that the community and the people that live there have to participate in it in an integral way In order for the research to have have value I'm not quite sure what you mean by traditional research So i'm going to put my own spin on it. I know you put quotations around that so i'm kind of thinking about, you know, the usual quantitative approach To research and community-based research is by and large qualitative It may have some quantitative aspects to it, but it's very different in that It allows you to explore the complexity Of community issues and community research, which you can't do when you're simply trying to quantify a problem That's it's not possible. So it's much broader and some people use the term community-based research They mean more of an approach where if you're talking about say health promotion or disease prevention where Researchers will go into the community. That's their forum for disseminating information to people about health promotion And that can be a very sort of top-down from a research perspective They're just using the community as a almost the the setting in which they are doing their research Um, and there's almost a continuum then from the that kind of If that you could call that the traditional community-based research and then at the other end of the continuum is what The community development stuff has informed is kind of at more of an action research approach And that's the stuff that fully and completely involves community members even in defining What it is they want to research and what they want to change and usually it's it's informed with a change perspective That you there's something in in there that in the community That's an identified thing that that people want to change So there's sort of and then there's a variety of things that fall in between those two sort of opposite ends of the spectrum You're listening to first person plural on cfu v victoria's public radio 101.9 fm 104.3 cable And on the internet cfu v dot uveg dot ca Giving sociology an edge This is a hard this is a it's a difficult area community-based research. It's hard to remain true to it because Sometimes what you have in mind as the researcher or even for myself is kind of in the middle of it all, right? um You have an idea and you think it's a pretty good idea, but the community doesn't necessarily share that idea So then you're in a bit of a pickle, right? How do you work with the community so that either they See the wisdom of of what you're trying to do or you realize the stupidity of what you're trying to do by taking direction from the community and one of the things that um Doug does is he tries to keep us honest In how we work with the community So if we profess that we're going to take direction from the community then Doug reminds us when we aren't Or you know, he plays that which is is exactly what he should be doing as a community member Well, maybe a more specific question then How can community research benefit the communities being researched? What kinds of challenges are faced by communities when they're part of these projects? Well, I think there are several And probably pretty obvious benefits that are available to the community One of them would be that we're able to learn about ourselves Through the expertise and methods that the researchers are bringing We may have day-to-day perceptions of what our community is like But the application of scientific method or the survey information or whatever Can tell us quite a number of things that weren't immediately evident And we referred earlier today to how diverse the community is and in fact, there are different Sub-communities if you want to call it that within the geographic area of the study and also the area that our group works with Uh, and again, we might be kind of dimly aware of that But the research gives us some facts and figures and Quantitative as well as qualitative impressions of of what those issues really might be So the first advantage is that the research tools themselves are illuminating and they help us to learn things about ourselves That we might not otherwise have learned The second advantage is that to the extent that the researchers are interested in carrying forward projects which we Were interested in already There's everything from extra sets of hands and that the people on the research team can help us to do things right through to funding and If I think about some of the mapping exercises we're doing we had a demonstration the other day of some Uh graphical or geographical information system technology And it was interesting to me because in the demonstration I think the people were trying to show us from a technicians point of view what this technology did But the community folks were all immediately zeroing in on the content in the maps and saying well, that's not right Or oh look at that Or whatever so again looking looking at ourselves through a different lens or or Um seeing ourselves in a different light because of the expertise that people have um So funding obviously additional human resources and additional insights would be advantages some of the challenges I guess uh to some extent are the mirror images of those in the sense that And it's been mentioned already that some of what the community's Objectives are maybe different than the researchers um I think if I if I think of a more traditional Scientific model if I were studying a community of animals or insects or whatever There would be a what was called a top-down approach We bring the research protocol to the problem and the subjects really are just Subjects there there's a distance or an alienation between them and the researchers Well, we don't think of our community as something to be studied It's where we live and and you know the concerns that we have are are the concerns that that people have in their daily lives and to the extent that um The research methodology or approach Alienates us from that that's a challenge Another challenge. I think is that a lot of the Community components of the research are done by volunteers And they're generally people who have day jobs and they come to meetings at night And they're they're tired and they have family responsibilities or whatever And so have quite a different perspective on meetings and outcomes than perhaps people who are paid to participate And I wouldn't say this about anybody who's present today But there has been discussion in the past about research type projects where it seems to be enough to the researchers to have a meeting and have some energy And and to kind of go away and say well that was a fun event Whereas the community people say that was three hours out of my life And I had to get someone to take care of my kids or you know, I I didn't get my My paper done that I had to get done for the next day or whatever it was And so I needed to see some outcome You know, it wasn't enough just to see some community dynamics happening We want to see some product and and so again, that's an example of how the objectives Of the people doing the study may differ from the objectives Of the people who aren't just people like anybody else Who are participating on a volunteer basis? I guess the the next thought that I have is is around What are the the ultimate outcomes for the community? And not to pick on what you said Demi, but if if the objectives are different And the measures are different then it's unlikely that the research project will be seen to be a success So again, well I raise that Doug actually did as a point of of what you have to work towards in this type of research You have to come together on that or else it isn't you know, just the point you made It isn't going to be a success. You can't ignore that. It's part of the process for the community and the researchers To reach consensus on what it is if it's really community-driven research Well, and I think we've talked before about Different ideas people had and and I've tried to bring the community's perspective How would people respond to the idea? I'm thinking of one where we were we were talking about You know recording and broadcasting some of our meetings and and We always have this tension between Something to be kind of a neat and cool thing to do for the project. Yeah, and thinking well. What would the response to people be? You know if you're thinking of Someone who's at university And then someone rolls in one day and says i'm going to film the class and broadcast what you've said on the internet or Whatever, yeah, the students are probably going to go wait a minute. Um, this wasn't what I expected and let's talk about it And people in a community are no different So as we think about how we want to do data collection or how we want to interact with Some of the existing institutions of the community or just wide open public meetings We always have to think You know, what does it look like from their point of view because They may be people who are quote-unquote disadvantaged Or challenged or you know by definition, we wouldn't be doing the study if we didn't think there was something interesting there But at the same time, there are people who have individual dignity and concerns and aren't necessarily interested in furthering other people's Objectives, yeah, and you see that's that's really a challenging Issue for a project of this size which is community-based Because a lot of community-based research projects you have a small group of people who are really They're from the community, but they're driving it So they make the decisions around it and to a certain extent We have that with almost all of our initiatives that we have going on in this project but as they grow you're involving more and more people and Those people have different ideas. There's not consensus within the larger group that's developing So it's it's it's quite interesting and how this uh, how this is all all going to boil down at the end of the day Well, can I just add one more point there? Now what I was going to I just wanted to support what you were saying around the researchers Not sort of studying the community. I think that's another important difference between community-based research and traditional research Researchers don't try to be objective In this situation. They try to be part of the community They recognize that it's there's a lot of artificiality around objectivity anyway But it's clearly part of the methodology to be immersed in the community because that informs the research question develops more understanding of the context And that relates to what what I was going to say in the sense that there's there are a lot of tensions even in that faced by researchers because All of the stuff that they normally apply for grants and stuff that requires them to have this very sort of A view of research as very objective and very top-down and of course the researchers decide what they want to study and so even people that are granting projects Are just starting to have this other kind of community Research involved and they don't always they still sometimes require the researchers to have the very heavily quantitative objective kind of approach to how they evaluate it. And so I think some of the granting agencies need to Take a new perspective if they're going to have You know fund community research Also researchers are often aren't trained You know to work with communities in the way that doug was describing You have to involve the humans for whom it is a problem Well, especially because it's such a heavy volunteerism aspect from the community point of view I mean these are people who don't have to come if they don't want to so This type of research is reliant on community members coming out and applying their time and effort and and resources and Pretty much the incident that it starts to smell wrong to them. They melt away So we have to be aware of the human You're listening to first person plural on cfu v 101.9 fm victoria in the early 70s of Trying to basically impose birth control in india and not understanding why Indian women would not want to take the birth control pill I mean they were poor and they wouldn't they really want to have some control over how many children they had when in fact What was going on in those communities was because there was a high infant mortality rate and child mortality rate that Families really need to have lots of children because they needed children to support the parents and extended family members in their old age So there's no way that the community women were going to take birth control I've heard that about indonesia as well. Yeah, it probably happened in lots of places You see the assumption there is that the if I can be brutally blunt about this Is that those women didn't know where babies come from and once we showed them and gave them technology It would solve their problem A we misunderstood what the problem was as you've said, but b we had an incredible arrogance about How much we as the smirk people knew that's and how little the community people knew The example that makes sense to me is is smoking In our society who could not know that smoking is dangerous to your health. It's on the cigarette packs It's all over the media. I think everyone has been exposed to the message The fact that people continue to smoke in spite of that is not because they don't know it's bad There must be some other factor And so if we bring to these research projects the notion that all we have to do is tell people some information And they will change We may be frustrated That's a great example because um There are different approaches one might take with different communities again around smoking But unless you work with those communities you have no idea what the solutions might be because you don't understand the problem For example, women we know if you look at the problem of smoking with women with a gender lens And involve women in the discussion about why does they continue to smoke? There's all sorts of other issues for women. There's issues around body image and weight loss and There's a whole other dimension there So you might apply a totally different kind of strategy to try to encourage women to quit smoking And then you would with men but unless you involve women in that discussion unless you become immersed as part of the community To understand it you're not going to get those answers Well, and you know the path project being focused on health many of the things that we're trying to do through the project Relate to encouraging people in midlife to change their behavior patterns not because they're particularly ill now But because their health in later life will be profoundly affected and smoking is one diabetes It's another just getting people out walking two or three times a week You know would improve their health. That's right. But again, uh, do people know they should exercise more eat less and not smoke I think they know that right and so we need to get to much more fundamental kinds of Of issues and we we hear people say well if only there was a safe place to walk I would go walking Well for that's great and we should build those chip trails But we should not be surprised if they aren't filled with people You know the day that they open because there's undoubtedly something else going on People talk about I don't go walking because I'm afraid of crime And then we go and get the stats and we find out that we don't really have very much crime We have a lot of fear of crime, but we don't have very much crime And so again, it's the solution to reduce the crime statistics and get more police Well, it turns out that the complaints I hear through the neighborhood association When we do get additional police attention Is that it's interpreted the wrong way. It's not oh, I'm glad to see that police car. I feel safer now. It's Seeing the police car as evidence of how dangerous it is in my neighborhood. And so I'm definitely not going to go out So again, we're dealing with some phenomena here Which are part of a matrix that comes from larger society and the media and I don't know where Factors that that we have to get at And another example is we have a very difficult place right at the edge of our neighborhood Motel it's used as a center for drug dealing and criminal activity And one of the ideas was that we get a neighborhood crew together and go and paint the place because it looks bad It was an outsider who had that idea the neighborhood immediately said well, that makes no sense at all to us we had Right-wingers who said that's private property and I wouldn't want someone coming from my house to be painting it without my permission We had left-wingers who said that's not going to solve the problem You know, it's a it's a fundamental environmental Sociological kind of problem and a coat of paint can't address it But everybody immediately reacted negatively Because it was treating a symptom And not a fundamental problem and if people were shooting up in that motel They would continue to do so if it had a new coat of paint on the outside because they weren't Doing it because it looked Tacky and we often see these kinds of quote-unquote good ideas We I think have talked before about the the urban renewal and construction of a major Traffic artery through our neighborhood that happened 40 years ago and the scars are still there and when we hold public meetings and talk about neighborhood history and And and the future People talk about that to this day And the irony of it is that the some of the facilities created through that have not succeeded The school for example It was built as is likely to be closed and we had this huge empty area in the middle of the neighborhood Created by people who undoubtedly had the best of intentions at the time To solve the problems that the neighborhood had when in fact it it damaged and hurt the neighborhood To the point where 40 years later people sit in rooms and talk about How bad that was So all these things have kind of a theme I suppose that that people are trying to apply the tools they know Regardless of whether it's a good fit people are treating symptoms instead of fundamental causes and Arguably it all comes from not understanding what the underlying Fabric if you like of the community is and therefore imposing things from the outside or top down that But not only don't solve the problem and sometimes they actually create more harm than good to There's a lot of really complex think complex issues Which is Reminding me again of how hard it is to do research with communities because of all the issues involved in the You know the different interests in the community and that kind of thing But for me, I mean even though it's really hard for researchers to do this kind of work and for communities to do this kind of work It's not a reason for researchers to stay away by any means From a health promotion perspective as well I mean if you're going to try and tackle those root causes of you know unhealthy lifestyles or ill health that the socioeconomic and the The broader determinants of health then you have to do that with communities You have to do that in the context So you have to do this research and you have to if you're going to Have any effect on health as a health promoter you have to work with communities. So It's you know, even though it's hard I think it's just something that that has to be done. I mean that's the only route to to change I think Well, I really agree and I think you know the history that we have of sort of urban planning and design is Is a history of optimism that if we could we can design our way out of social problems and it's somehow You know some of the problems that communities have Relate to the physical and built environment. There's no question that that improvements can be helpful and they can have an influence But but they're not fundamental and the kinds of things Laura that you're talking about Which are much more difficult to research Being more fundamental ultimately have a lot more leverage probably to deal with some of these issues then as I say You know if you want people to walk more make more trip trails and they'll get out and walk and run Well, maybe they will maybe they won't we need to understand the problem more deeply than that After a time objectivism has done all it can do And at that point it has two choices it can Turn it over to other methodologies or it can simply assert that there can be no other methodologies Well, you know, I don't I don't want to give the impression that that So-called scientific method isn't useful earlier on I was saying one of the benefits of the community is to see ourselves through Different lenses and these tools can be helpful And I think of it as as you know If you're trying to solve a problem with your automobile You logically break out the different systems and you do an analytical approach You're probably going to find out that the carburetor is flawed and get it fixed The problem that we're facing is a human community. These are vastly more complex than than an automobile And using only that analytical method Is not going to get us where we want to go But I wouldn't want to throw at the baby with the bathwater here. There definitely is some value in the Objective and quantitative approach. It's just that we don't want to stop there. We need to to do more You need different methods for different purposes, right? And I would say that there is a scientific method involved in qualitative research It's just not a positivistic one, right? But it's you know, it's methodological. It's a method There's there's um, there's a process that you go through. There are steps. It's just there are different kinds of steps and involves reflection and Um, you know re-looking at what you've done and constantly changing it. There's you know with the positivistic approach Here's point a and you get to point b and you figure out what caused the The uh, the reaction in the middle But um with community based research, that's that's that's not the method, right? You look at what you've done You recognize that what you've done is going to have some effect Uh on what you're trying to change and then you change your method to make it more useful and so on so forth Well, I'd like to thank you again for coming to DEC. It's been uh, very pleasant speaking with you about these issues Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for inviting us We're listening to first person plural Your source Of sociological The police state is using its phallocentric organ the corporate media to control ordinary people like you and me We'd like to thank everyone who tuned in to first person plural during our first year of broadcast It's hard to believe it's been a year. Yes, but it has well nearly so a day short of a year We've enjoyed doing this show up to a point. There's a kind of creative tension between us creative Yeah, I think so. Don't you? Yeah, I would say so. I think we work well together if that's what you mean Yeah, and I've had a lot of people tell me that that's the charm of the show that it's obvious that you and I are Sympatico that we talk about these in a tense kind of way Yeah in an entertaining sort of way We have a share of action scenes. It's probably the best way to put it Bow bow Wap, Biff, boy Batman. I can't believe we got out of that one. Holy crap Batman Of course, my voice keeps getting going away, which sort of isn't cool when you do a radio show No, in fact, it's fatal. That's true Maybe you should switch over to video full-time that way you can just show up and look pretty and that would be the end of your obligations Aside from the off-screen work I think my brains are more important than my beauty is the problem. Oh, I wouldn't say that Well, you're um Biased so let's talk about the last year. Okay. What have you enjoyed most About doing first person plural? I've enjoyed a lot of different things about it So it's really hard to pick out just one The fact that we use such a variegated approach is one of the things that I like about it Which is a cop-out answer, but it's my answer I've gotten to talk to a lot of really interesting people pick their brains and I found that enjoyable I've gotten to look into a lot of issues in depth that you just don't find in the popular media And I found that gratifying and I've gotten to spend a lot of time sitting around a table almost exactly like this one Speaking to you about these issues, which is something that we were doing before we did the radio show But now we get to record it. Yeah. In fact, we did a radio show before this one an internet radio show It was called coffee shop and we did that for a little bit over a year It did 30 episodes of that and it consisted of us going to a coffee shop Turning on a cheap tape recorder and just recording our conversations onto normal bias cassettes And that was the show we just came up with a different seed topic each time and talked about that for a while And then meandered and perhaps meandered back and perhaps didn't and that was coffee shop It was predictably well regarded by the critics and completely ignored by the public Predictably. Yeah, let's hope that doesn't become the story of our lives Critically acclaimed impoverished. Yeah, let's uh, let's hope we're cut out for better things than that I think we are. What have you enjoyed about this show? Let's turn the question around Well, I've actually enjoyed the production of it more than the being on the air part of it I think that's one of the ways that you and I compliment each other I've done a lot of good writing in the last year. You've done a lot of excellent writing in the last year Yeah, and I've enjoyed bringing concepts together that I don't think other people would necessarily bring together So that's been fun. And I like I like writing the I don't do all the writing for the show Let me make that clear, but the writing that I do for the show I've really enjoyed and I've enjoyed learning how to edit I've learned an awful lot about how sound works and how editing works and I've not always been very good at it. I've sort of learned a lot by trial and error But what's community radio if it isn't full of trial and error? I wonder how atypical we are in that we pre-record most of our show each week I think we probably are pretty atypical But I'm glad we did it the way we did because I think that our ultimate direction is not to become radio Broadcasters, which makes us a little bit different as well Our ultimate direction I think is going to be multimedia production And it will probably end up on film more than on audio alone and the Pre-recording of the audio and learning how to edit and move things in and out And that kind of thing has been great preliminary practice on a lot less of a budget Then editing for film and we are finding for those of you don't realize this But we're in the process of learning how to do film We're kind of learning it informally on our own again with practice making perfect That we are finding it much easier to pick up on editing of digital film after having edited digital sound So I'm really glad that we did it the way we did even though we didn't plan it that way Yeah, it's been a good form for practice of nothing else. They keep telling us well You have to start somewhere we went from tape recording a conversation and caring only if it was intelligible to a much higher level Of production. Yes, but it wasn't just a production It was also the idea that I was on the air and while I knew I was on the air So to speak on the internet I also had a good idea of how many people were and were not listening And we were having conversations that we already had. We just had a tape recorder on We weren't trying anything new or anything different other than we just stuck a tape recorder in between us In other words, we've been we've been going for coffee and having long talks about the world Ever since we've known each other the 12 years that we've lived together sure absolutely That was not anything big or new They putting something together in a creative way for the radio show and then being on the air and not really knowing Who's listening and who isn't and sort of being shocked every time I hear that somebody is It made me nervous. I mean I had jitters I still get a little bit of jitters And I mean one of the reasons that we started pre-recording is because I had such jitters that I didn't think I could do it live And it kind of felt good to be a novice in a weird sort of way It made me feel like there's still stuff out there to learn and the show hasn't been 100 Pre-recorded. I've done live voice breaks more often than not Keeping people up to date about our website that sort of thing and I've enjoyed that and last minute things too There have been sure some things that it seemed important to talk about and we didn't know that when we were pre-recording Have you enjoyed doing the website? You seem to get something out of it. Yeah, that's another thing is that I like doing website development And yeah, I mean, I'm really not anywhere near an expert at it. I'm heavily dependent upon Web in a box. Yeah web in a box. That's good. I was going to say babysitting web But yeah, so I'm I'm not, you know, I'm doing very well with that with those constraints But I know of people who can take things and do far more than I can do having said that I've really enjoyed doing it and I've really enjoyed the response to it You know people pick up on it. I get an email from people who read things and are interested From that perspective. So it already is multimedia. I mean even before we added the film We were doing multimedia because of the website presence. That's right. I think I've asked your skills I think you have the single most important skill necessary of a webmeister or maestris Maestris my my germans a little weak And that is the willingness to update the site once in a while. I prefer web diva. I'm sure you don't But there are any number of people who put up a website and never update it again And whenever I see a website that hasn't obviously been updated within the last year I think dead site and I lose interest Well, and we do we have weekly visitors We have people who visit weekly to check out because I change it every week You've been tracking it. Haven't you you're using nedstat. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's the name of the program. What can you tell using nedstat? I want to make sure that people don't think that we know where they live and what kind of Oh, no, you can't know that you can tell who I mean some people have their own domain names So they're pretty easy to mark because when they show up from their own domain name I know who they are. Um, but there are other people who use University domain names So I've got a general idea of who they are to sure because I know of different people who are at different universities So I suspect when I see a university name that it is somebody from that university that I know That's not necessarily true. It tells you the country of origin, which is really interesting because we've been visited by Over 35 different countries. Of course the name of our website is cultural construction company And I have a suspicion that we get traffic from people who are looking to build things Yeah, I think the emails I've received asking me about buying scrap lumber Suffice to prove that. Yeah, we're all that a sufficient argument in and of itself We're on a few developer web lists and that kind of thing. So we get interesting junk mail The way that it works. I've got markers on more than one webpage So I can tell the people who just visit the front index page and don't go anywhere and people who are negotiating through the website And from that information, I can figure out whether or not people are really coming to read and visit Or they're just hitting it and finding out that it indeed is not a construction company So it doesn't tell me a lot, but it tells me some there's also a thing that tells me where it got linked from Like I run a blog Called fattie patties and I had to give the url go ahead and give the url. Sure. Yeah, it's um fattie f a t t y you gotta spell it out p a t t i e s dot blog spot. That's b l o g s p o t dot com Or you can go to cultural construction company and look at the table of contents and link to it from there And fattie patties gets the most traffic because blogs get more traffic than anybody else In personal web pages and because it belongs to several different web rings that kind of thing But I had a spike a couple of weeks ago Like almost twice as much as usual traffic on a particular day and I couldn't figure out why I mean that usually means that somebody's Referring to the page somewhere. Well, yeah, that's automatic. Isn't it? Yeah, necessarily the case, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean you're being linked by somebody else is what I mean That somebody's written about you and they've put a link up to your web page That's that's usually what a spike in traffic means. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean as opposed to a random occurrence Right, got it But I couldn't figure out how to tell and then I discovered that net stat actually will tell you where people linked from And when I found that out, I actually was able to trace it back and found where One of my favorite websites called alas a blog That's alas comma a blog who is a cartoonist. He's a really great art cartoonist He goes by the handle ampersand He's one of my favorite writers on the net and I was so excited because he actually put on his Blog that he was reading everything on my website. So apparently we're mutual fans. Well, that's great It's always good to know that somebody's impressed. I suppose I was being annoyed earlier by critical acclaim in the absence of Popular acclaim, but I admit that having neither would bother me a great deal more But we also have been linked by two or three other web pages on permanent links to cultural construction company So some like-minded people. Um, there's a website called why work dot org Which gets into discussions of how to define work and how to define what is meaningful work And they've linked to our manifesto, you know slowly, but surely we're getting a presence on the web And I really like that presence I think though that we've what we've got to do in the next year as long as we're doing the anniversary thing and thinking Out loud as it were about past and future Is I think the next step for us is to find projects that actually pay And I'm more hopeful about that with video than I am with radio Our listeners at home may be curious about exactly how well this pays. This project is not paying us a dime We're doing it essentially on a negative budget The the radio station has let us make use of some of their equipment which we found to be extremely helpful But we've had to cover a lot of expenses ourselves and we're not getting any revenue I've done a little poking around as to what exactly one can do to feed oneself and spoken word radio in canada My best guess at this time is that you're either working for the cbc or cladio canada Or you're not getting paid that it's almost that simple or you're doing some sort of popular dribble that shows up On commercial radio and you pretty well style your soul So we're talking about soulful employment as well as lucrative. We're talking about something suitable for a college graduate Yeah, and killing time between commercials was not what I had in mind. Yep, the luma news holes The news holes. Yeah, that's a j word, isn't it? Yes, that's a j word that just basically means that Newspapers get laid out. Um, the first thing that gets laid out in a newspaper is the ads. Yes, that's right the advertisements and then And then this this look is meant to walk convey surprise And it does in a facetious sort of sarcastic way Anyway, so then after that the things that bring people to the newspaper are laid out the regular features such as the comics and the ongoing bridge tips and the deer abbeys or whatever it is in canada That kind of thing gets laid out next and then after all of these things have been laid out They figure out how much news they're going to tell you so Newspaper is actually a huge misnomer. I can confirm this from my personal experience I was looking for a job when I was much younger with this sports paper in florida where we lived for entirely too long And I contacted one of the two guys who was in charge of the paper and he said Oh, we just concern ourselves with selling advertising if there's any room left over then One of us just writes something to fill it in. That's not verbatim, but that was essential yet It was that the sports writing was compared after thought it's a filler You know, why would you hire anybody to do that? Yeah, it was oh, no, that's not something for which one gets paid No, no, that's something one does after the work is finished After the real work our goal this year is to find some ways to make our lives more sustainable Instead of just filling news holes and instead of doing wonderful things on community radio I mean having lived in a country where community radio is pretty well gone And is pretty well whatever's left or what someone's of it is left is pretty corporate oriented I really appreciate community radio in canada and I've been very happy to have it available to us But it is obvious that it can't go on forever, but we are going to try to do first person plural this year I don't want to leave the impression that the experiment is over No, this is not our farewell episode or anything like that. Yeah, we're going to slow down a little bit over the summer So you'll hear some reruns if there's something that you missed that you'd love to hear again You can email us at fpp at cultural construction company dot com and we'll be happy to Well, we'll be happy to get any kind of feedback And we'll most likely honor any request that you make From that feedback, but yeah, we'd be willing to um to offer up reruns on request Let's go over the urls and the emails again. Sure the email is fpp at cultural construction company dot com The page for the show first person plural is fpp dot cultural construction company dot com Yeah, let's make it clear that cultural construction company Is all one word no space is in between it and you have to write out company. No fair writing co and leaving it at that That's not going to work the page for cultural construction company itself is www dot cultural construction company dot com You could have figured that one out, but why not make it official and patty's giving you her blog url once already She may as well give it to you again It's fatty patty's. That's f a t t y p a t t i e s Dot blog spot dot com and that's how you get in contact with us and otherwise check up with us when we're not actually on the air so Here's to us and to another year of first person plural. Yeah, here's to it You have been listening to first person plural because how people get along with each other still matters First person plural Is a show created for community radio by carl wilkerson and dr. Patty thomas to examine social and organizational issues music for first person plural is performed composed and produced By carl wilkerson except where noted For more information about first person plural dr. Patty thomas or carl wilkerson Visit our website www.culturalconstructioncompany.com Or email us at fpp at culturalconstructioncompany.com