Registration is now open for the CMA Conference 2012 and AGM, to be held at the City of Bath College on Saturday 16 June. The Conference will celebrate 10 years of community radio, the advent of local television in the UK and much much more!

Highlights include a Keynote Speech by Ed Vaizey MP, Minister for Culture, Communications & Creative Industries, and an “In conversation with…” Zane Ibrahim, father of community radio in Africa.

CMA members purchasing at least one full priced ticket can bring up to 3 volunteers for free (though we will not be able to confirm all volunteer places until nearer the time due to the capacity of the venue).

We look forward to seeing you at the Conference.

ALISA bridges the gap between your online streaming and your Listen Again platform. With ALISA you can record your station’s output and automatically upload it to the Listen Again platform. Just complete an online schedule with details of your shows and everything you want to record gets automatically uploaded and stores upto 20 gigabytes of programmes..

Cost: £10 per month or £100 per year +VAT with a podcasting account only from Canstream!

Our “Station Manager’s Toolbox” features some of the web’s best resources to help with managing your station and your volunteers. We particularly like to highlight free and open source resources.

One new community radio licence has been awarded by Ofcom this month. Radio Beca is planning a Welsh-language service covering a large area in West Wales.

They propose a station covering the counties of Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, using three transmitters to cover this sparsely-populated region.

The station was created by listeners to a previous commercial station in the area, Radio Ceredigion, after it was taken over and reduced Welsh programming last year.

We all make radio on tight budgets these days – but how do you make your programming stand out when resources are squeezed to the bone?

Award-winning BBC producer Maria Williams has put together a list of six quick tips that can help you and your presenters put together amazing radio on a budget.

From getting out and about from the safety of the studio, to creative use of sound effects and listener interaction, these tips will help you take your output to the next level.

With local and mayoral elections, along with several mayoral referendums, coming up this Thursday (3 May), Ofcom would like to remind all stations and licence holders where to find information about the Broadcasting Code rules which apply during election and referendum periods.

The CMA has published a set of links to the relevant Ofcom guidance on our website.

On election day itself, please make your presenters and volunteers particularly aware that the results of exit polls and predictions should not be broadcast until the close of polls.

To avoid unnecessary Ofcom licence breaches and possible fines, please do take the time to remind yourself of the rules surrounding election period broadcasting.

If you’re launching or equipping a community radio station, do you really need to buy expensive professional audio editing software from the big names?

Open-source developers Sourcefabric have put together a useful list of free, open-source audio tools for Windows, Mac and Linux, to help you create radio on a budget.

Central Lancashire (Preston), Dundee & Perth, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Humberside, Inverness, Leeds, Liverpool, Northern Ireland, South Yorkshire (Sheffield), Tyne & Wear, Teesside.

New contracts will run for a period of up to 12 years, and interested parties should contact Bauer Digital Radio by email by Monday 7th May 2012.

Several community radio stations have launched on DAB over the past few months, most recently The Voice, in North Devon.

How important is the ‘hyperlocal’ sector, what does it cover, and what are its prospects for sustained development? Will hyperlocal resources really fulfil their promise and bring about distinctive social change by weakening the centrifugal forces of contemporary politics?

To help us begin finding some answers, here is a ‘landscape’ paper prepared by Damian Radcliffe, formerly an Ofcom adviser (and also a member of the advisory group for the Online Neighbourhood Networks study). Damian was one of the first people in an official national capacity to grasp the significant potential of local online resources, and he explored its potential with welcome enthusiasm.

Nominations are open now for this year’s Technology4Good Awards. You can nominate someone else or enter yourself.

These awards are open to UK-based charities, businesses, public bodies, individuals, social enterprises, schools, colleges, community organisations and anyone else who is using technology for good.

You can enter as many Awards as you wish and nominations are open until midnight on 18 May 2012.

Try our Canstream “RSL Bundle”. We have a package aimed specifically for stations about to start a Restricted Service Licence. With any of our live streaming accounts you also get 2 months Listen Again alongside.

From just £60+VAT you can stream live 24hrs a day for a month and upload over 8 hours of your best bits with no download restrictions. Also included are complete online statistics. Tell your mates about us with [FORWARD].

Canstream is delighted to tell you about our free service. If you webcast with Canstream then we can automatically email you a warning if you become disconnected. This is an opt-in service for all clients using Canstream for their live streaming.

What if you are away from your desk or don’t have a smart phone? Not a problem because if your stream becomes disconnected we can also send you an SMS text message!

Email notification is free, the SMS text service is priced at £5 per month. Email us for further info or to sign up.

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has announced the launch of a new £1million small grants programme for people to get involved in their heritage. Called “All Our Stories”, the programme will provide grants of £3,000 – £10,000 to support charities, community groups and heritage organisations running local history projects.

The closing date for applications is the 31st July 2012. For information visit the Heritage Lottery Fund website.

Creative Industry Finance is a forthcoming Arts Council England initiative offering business development support and access to finance for creative industry enterprises.

The programme will provide practical advice and support for creative entrepreneurs wishing to develop and grow their business as a viable commercial enterprise.

In addition to the business support package, a limited number of business development loans of £5,000-£25,000 will also be made available for successful applicants, repayable over a maximum of three years. If creative content is at the heart of your business this programme may be able to help.

Full details will be announced by the end of May when the programme is open for applications.

The Technology Strategy Board is to invest up to £1.8m in feasibility projects that address the converged nature of the digital landscape. The programme will be delivered in three parts during 2012. The TSB seeks projects that focus on convergence in hyper-local media models, content origination tools, and analytical feedback and metrics tools.

Projects should last up to 12 months and are eligible for grants of up to £56,250 or 75% of total costs. Total project costs must not exceed £75,000.

More information can be found on the NESTA website.

KCC Live in Merseyside are looking for a commission-based fundraiser to help sustain their youth-led radio service.

You will be expected to secure a certain level of funding per month in order to help run the community station as per legislative guidelines regarding the funding of community stations. You are required to earn a minimum target per quarter, but the % commission you take is negotiable and can be flexible.

Garrison FM (Blandford Forum, Dorset) are looking for part time presenters to work 4 hours a day, hosting a show, arranging interviews and organising their schedule. It’s a 5-day a week job.

You will have your own car and be flexible in your approach to how you work and when and be prepared to take on a number of associated tasks as well as presentation during your working hours. Flexible working at weekends may also be required.

To apply, send an edited MP3 aircheck to jobs@garrisonfm.com together with an email covering letter.

Hot on the heels of self-driving cars and mobile phone OS innovations, Google have come out with their latest party trick – a pair of so-called ‘augmented reality’ glasses that superimpose Google content on your real-life view.

A team within Google started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that they say “helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment”.

TweetedTrips allows tweeting travellers to create and share an interactive map of their tweets, complete with their photos and an ‘Indiana Jones-style’ polyline of the journey.

Creating a Google Map of your journey couldn’t be easier. All you really need to do is enter your Twitter user name. TweetedTrips then automatically creates a map of your geolocated Tweets. If some of your Twitter messages aren’t geo-located you can manually add them to the map.

The latest version of popular open-source operating system Ubuntu was released last week. Version 12.04 LTS, dubbed “Precise Pangolin” by its makers, includes a host of new features and a refined user interface.

Ubuntu 12.04 is a “Long Term Support” release, meaning it will be supported with updates for at least five years. It can be downloaded via this website. Since its introduction in 2004, it has seen widespread adoption around the world, particularly among non-profit organisations.

What is it? An application to allow you to add rich media, such as YouTube videos, SoundCloud recordings and Wikipedia entries to photographs.

The Arts Council England and The BBC arts partnership The Space will launch next week. From the 8th May The Space will be open for additional content and existing artistic works.

To see full editorial policy and how to submit work, go to The Space Editorial Policy.

The Sound Art Show on BCB 106.6 fm is a half hour programme designed to engage new and hard to reach audiences in the Bradford district by making Sound Art more accessible.

Financial support of up to £5000 is available from Women Make Music, and new music in any genre is welcome, from classical, jazz and experimental, to urban, electronica and pop. Application deadlines are 17 May for the first round, and 10 October for the second. Click here for more information and to apply.

Date: 8:30-11am, 15 May 2012
Venue: Museum of London, 150 London Wall, EC2Y 5HN

Arts Council England is bringing together the people behind some of London’s most exciting cultural celebrations for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games this summer, in an event at the Museum of London.

With representatives from more than 30 projects gathering in one place, there is sure to be something of interest to your audiences. Come along to hear what’s going on and plan your stories for what will be a very special year for culture in the capital. To attend, please RSVP to press.office@artscouncil.org.uk by Tuesday 8 May.

Would you like to feature in this year’s Abandon Normal Devices? Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Micro Commissions are teaming up to offer a unique opportunity for professional and amateur artists, curators and producers.

They are seeking innovative ideas for an artwork, art project, exhibition or online/digital work responding to the theme of “success” to be presented during AND festival in Manchester from 29 August – 2 September 2012. Closing date is 24 May 2012.

[cma-l] Ofcom awards community radio licence to Radio Beca
thread started by CMA-L.

[cma-l] A history of community radio?
thread started by Roger Drury.

[cma-l] Syndication thread started by Reel Rebels Radio.