by Margaret Thompson

Feminist International Radio Endeavour (FIRE) will webcast live from Johannesburg, South Africa to cover the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa, from August 25-September 4, 2002, in collaboration with various international, regional, and local partners. 

For the daily broadcasts focusing on women’s perspectives on environmental and sustainable development issues, FIRE will be partnering with AMARC (The World Association of Community Radios) and its Women's International Network (WIN/AMARC) and WomensNet of South Africa, as well as a women’s daily newspaper, GEM WSSD, a publication of the African Woman & Child Feature Service. and....  Also collaborating with FIRE is the Women's Tent of WEDO (Women's Environmental & Development Organization), and the Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media at the University of Denver..

Live webcasting from international, regional or local venues is not a new strategy for FIRE, which started in 1991 by transmitting via shortwave, then shifted to Internet in 1998.   In the past 12 years, FIRE has broadcast from UN conferences and numerous other events and activities of the global, regional and local women's movements using a variety of technologies and collaborative strategies. 

For example at the global level, FIRE has broadcast from the UN Earth Summit in 1992 from Rio de Janeiro, the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, Austria in 1993, and the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 in Beijing, among others.

A Brief Look Back:  History of Live Broadcasting by FIRE 

One of the first live broadcasts by FIRE via shortwave took place in November, 1992, at the Latin American & Caribbean La Nuestra (That Which is Ours) Conference, which was a women's regional preparatory meeting for the UN Conference on Human Rights in Vienna the following year.  By broadcasting live, FIRE wanted to bring to an international audience the conceptual ideas and dialogue of the Latin American & Caribbean women's movement related to women's rights as human rights, a concept that was later adopted at the international level. 

The following year in January, 1993, FIRE conducted live daily broadcasts from the Latin American & Caribbean PrepCom for the UN Conference in Vienna, using a simple combination of a telephone line, a phone interface device, a radio mixing board, and 3-4 microphones to give a voice to women at the event.   Word of the live broadcasts being transmitted from a large tent soon spread to many participants who came looking for FIRE, and waited in line to go on the air.

The next month, in February, FIRE broadcast live from the Fifth International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women at the University of Costa Rica in San Jose, which attracted 1,500 women from many different countries.  Thus FIRE had launched its tradition of broadcasting women's voices to an international audience that included more than 60 countries.

In March, 1993, FIRE broadcast live via telephone from Cuba, calling back to the studios in Costa Rica, transmitting women's voices from the event, "Cuban Women Confront the Economic Boycott," organized by the Federation of Cuban Women (FEDIM).  This creative strategy involving various technologies has also become a strong tradition of FIRE, enabling live broadcasting from a variety of venues.

FIRE's reputation for broadcasting women's voices from unusual locations was strengthened both locally and internationally in February, 1995, with the widely acclaimed ECO-TOUR, when FIRE staff rode on horseback and transmitted campesina women's voices back to the shortwave studio via walkie-talkie, which were then broadcast on the air.  FIRE was part of a grassroots campaign that fought successfully to stop a proposal by the Costa Rican government to construct an enormous landfill site in a natural forest reserve in the mountains west of San Jose. 

FIRE Launches Broadcasts in Cyberspace
In 1998, FIRE shifted to Internet, and redesigned its strategies to combine technologies and actions to broadcast women's voices from a variety of locations.  FIRE is well aware of the “digital divide” involving access to the Internet, particularly for people in the Global South, and has developed strategies with other women´s media organizations around the world to rebroadcast their programs on traditional radio and in print media in order to expand distribution networks.  Likewise, women in many other countries produce programs that they send to FIRE to be rebroadcast through Internet.  As a result, FIRE programs feature work produced by women in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

FIRE has received numerous awards for its work, including two UNESCO awards in 1995 for productions that were presented at the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, and in 2001, a Constructor of Peace Award from the Costa Rican Ministry of Justice, and the Ministry of Work and Social Security for its work focusing on violence against women and more recelty, the P.E.N. International honorary metion in Puerto Rico for FIRE's book "Women's Voice on FIRE" published in the year 2000 by Anomaly Press in Austin, Texas.
 

Women's PEACECASTS Offer Alternative Perspectives of  9-11 
More recently, FIRE collaborated with other women's groups and women's media to  produce the Women's PEACECASTS, which were designed promote discussion among women in the aftermath of 9-11 across boundaries of nations, groups, philosophies, and also languages ranging from Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries, as well as the United States and North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.  Other collaborators included Women’s International News Gathering Service (WINGS) and Feminists for the Gift Economy (FGE).

Women’s groups and organizations participated with the organizers of the Women’s PEACECASTS to bring women on-line to be interviewed, prepare with them the topics, and disseminate the information throughout their networks for others to listen in. Women participated in the discussions either by telephone call, by telephone conference call, or in person at a discussion site. Their discussions were picked up over the phone by a webcasting studio operated by FIRE (Feminist International Radio Endeavour) in Costa Rica. FIRE relays the webcast to its server, for live streaming over the internet.   The convening organizations collectively directed the webcast interviews through a chat connection through the FIRE webpage. 

Likewise, listeners could participate in the peacecasts by forwarding comments or questions for the discussants either via e-mail or using the live Chat Room on the FIRE website. 

The PEACECAST audio files were also saved (both with a recording device at the FIRE studio and as a sound file on the server) for later re-use both on the internet and by radio stations. Radio stations could also broadcast live directly from the webcasts, although live webcast technology still lacks the high degree of consistency and reliability of older technologies such as satellite transmissions. Up to 400 listeners can currently listen at the same time to FIRE's webcasts live.  The recorded audio is archived on the internet for later listening, whenever people want to go to the site and listen. 

Other venues re-broadcast the programs via conventional radio, their web pages, magazines and electronic venues. Press, electronic mails and magazine journalists are listening to the Women’s PEACECASTS and producing features for their media.
 

Biography of a Feminist Pioneer in Internet Radio Engineering

Katerina Anfossi Gómez is the co- founder and co-producer and computer/webcast engineer for FIRE—Feminist International Radio Endeavour—an Internet radio that broadcasts to an international audience in Spanish and English from Costa Rica.

With a mission of “amplifying women´s voices,” and particularly those from the Global South, FIRE began broadcasting on shortwave radio in 1991, then shifted to the Internet in 1998.  Katerina, who has a law degree and is a longtime activist for women´s causes, has worked with FIRE as co-director since it began. 

During and since the transition to Internet, Katerina has led the organization in designing creative engineering strategies to use a combination of traditional radio and new computer technologies to create an Internet radio station.  Undaunted by claims of computer experts that such a task would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, in 1998 Katerina designed the technical process to do live webcasting using a radio mixing board, microphones, and a laptop computer, as well as creating a web radio magazine with audio files.  Since that time, FIRE has continued its live broadcasting tradition by doing webcasting from local, regional and international events including the five-year follow-up to the Fourth World UN Conference on Women in New York in 2000, and the UN Conference Against Racism in South Africa in 2001. 

In the recent women's PEACECASTS, Katerina designed a chat room for the FIRE website, which listeners can enter to pose questions to the interviewers during the webcasts, or conduct discussions of related issues during and afterward.  Listeners are also encouraged to write e-mails to FIRE that can be read on the air, which also helps create an interactive process involving producers, participants and the audience.

For more information, see the FIRE webpage in Spanish and English at: www.fire.or.cr, or write to fuegocr@racsa.co.cr.