Showcasing community media

Just as I was thinking that the technology may be getting better, but content is not necessarily more engaging, the Community Media Association sent me a reminder of The Showcase "the world's first streaming media archive of radio, TV, Internet projects and training materials from the community media sector." This now has about 200 items of web, audio and video projects. There is challenging material on racism, human rights, mental health and social exclusion mixed with gems in the history section including "a compilation of largely unedited raw audio interviews about life in the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War, recorded in Leicestershire in 1988".
I particularly liked Transient Tales , a video of simple animations of folk tales made by children from different countries, now based in London. The languages used include Farsi, Romanian, Tigrinya, Spanish, Kurdish, Dari, and Armenian as well as English.
The CMA has made great strides on the policy front in campaigning for community radio licences, and projects like The Showcase suggest to me that digital media may well make more contribution to community development than mainly text-based community networking projects, and online centres. Of course we need both/all. But the buzz is shifting.