A few days ago I went to my first conference: the Alliance for Community Media, in Madison, WI. It was their 50th anniversary, and a chance to put Raster in front of a few hundred people who actually run stations across the country. I didn’t go to validate a thesis. I went to meet the people who have been carrying this thing for decades.
We didn’t have any fancy banners or signs. Just a TV, a laptop, and a bowl of Tootsie Pops.
I had a simple plan: show stations on a screen, talk to operators, listen. Rebecca and her team from SPEAK MPLS were already in the room, which helped enormously. I wasn’t walking in cold.
Someone stopped. They recognized their station on the screen. They asked if they could send the link to their board, and whether their producers would need a training manual to use it. The second question was practical. The first was the whole point: a URL that looks like the station, not a login screen or a PDF.
By the end of the week I’d talked with operators, vendors, advocates, and a few people building parallel tools to preserve the movement, including Keri Stokstad’s Community Media Voices, an archive mapping the history, people, and stories that make this community so special.
I went in expecting product feedback which we got plenty of, but the bigger takeaway was simpler: it’s not about the content, it’s about the relationships. Community media isn’t just programming. It’s a town square where everyone can participate in fostering civic memory through creativity, collaboration and community building. It’s clear to us that what we’re building is more than just a tool for saving time. It’s a palce that deserves to be designed for everyone from the station managers behind the scenes to the producers creating the content and the viewers watching from home.
One thing that stuck: how much of the field is still held together by hand. Metadata re-keyed across traffic systems, spreadsheets, websites, and social posts. There isn’t currently a clean way to bring all of this data under the same roof while making content submission as easy as uploading a YouTube video, but we hope Raster can be that platform. Several stations asked for demos or pilot conversations. I’m working through those now, starting with the ones where the fit is obvious.
I’m still working out how to talk about Raster at this stage: free branded TV guide as the front door, Studio as the operational layer (scheduling, producer tools, team roles, Cablecast write-back). The goal is to remove friction without making Raster feel like a free utility instead of a platform. More conversations needed on that.
SPEAK MPLS is our deepest pilot. A few other stations already have live guides on the map, and this trip has me preparing for more to onboard soon.
Big thanks to Tommy Shenefield for bringing this opportunity to me. It was an experience I won’t forget.
More to come.