As I blogged earlier this week, I’m leaving community radio station NE1fm 102.5.
There’s been some lovely tweets made in response to my announcement. One I liked lots was;
People like this are the backbone of community radio – and comm orgs in general – and we probably don’t say thank you as much as we should.
— Peter Sullivan (@ceemage) May 28, 2013
And the people who do run community projects are the backbone. They sit up at night worrying when others sleep, I know, I’ve been there many times before. So I’ve decided for the next 8 days to blog everything station wise I’ve done to give a minuscule insight into some of the roles management take on.
Last night I popped in to see Rob Davies. Friday’s 8-10pm show. We discussed some station management stuff, I wound him up, he tried to guess why I was leaving, and I tried to access his Twitter. Pretty standard.
I’ve started writing my hand over too. It’s hard to condense knowledge into documentation though and I’m not abandoning the project. I’ll still be at the end of the phone if they really need help. I was one of the backbone amongst a small group and I know intricately all of the wiring, routing and configuration of every single piece of equipment at the radio station. Only one other person comes close to knowing how it all works.
Recently when the station started running in mono I was able within minutes to direct a volunteer to the offending piece of hardware. There’s probably 1km of wiring powering the station and I could draw a picture of every single cable and every single connector. That’s hard to train others who perhaps don’t have the same technical brain. But it is skills and knowledge on offer to people who want to learn it.
I also wonder what I’ll do with my Saturday mornings. Religiously I connect in every Saturday morning to check over our logging system, our music servers and studio computers. At the beginning of every month (ie: today) I tidy up the logger into month folders, and take an older month off to backup at an external FTP location. I also run and save statistics from our website and online streaming services and show these to the volunteers so they get a sense of who’s listening where. I also spent the morning migrating the stations online streaming server to a new location, updating all of the links on the website, the code for the webplayer and then notifying listeners via social media. I finally then scheduled some pre-recorded programming. It’s just dawned on me that this morning was the last time I’ll do a lot of that.
So there’s an insight into one little bit, I’m going to have to take up making cooked breakfasts on Saturday mornings!
