Until recently, the peak Community Radio body, the CBAA, kept an interactive tool on their website which was able to point you to your nearest Community Radio station. This was unfortunately removed and replaced with a long table, which you could not filter and was not sorted based on location, but rather on alphabetical order.
The CBAA forgot one of the most important aspects of community radio in a community – location. Community Radio exists to talk about topical points in their area, and most people looking to get involved simply don’t care about stations in other regions. Instead of focussing on community, the CBAA focused on “hey, look how many stations pay us”.
CommunityRadio.Sydney was a tool to address this. It featured an interactive online map, where you were able to enter your address and be taken to your nearest community radio station, or a Google Map, where you can visualise the licensed broadcast area to see who’s serving your community,
The project was discontinued by myself as I’d started University and left community radio, and while the project gained a few financial supports raising almost $100 in crowdfunding in its first 6 months, it was not possible to continue long term due to the high costs of the domain, hosting and the further development that was needed to optimise the tool.