The Community Media Index concept document provides a rational for the CMI including the detailed overview of the state of community media projects (including challenges and opportunities), and suggesting the possible applications of the CMI. 

Download a copy of the CMI Concept Document here shortly.

The CMI suggests that there are four key dimensions of a media project that need to be assessed in order for a full and balanced picture of the state of the project to emerge. 

• Dimension 1 – Purpose and Impact: This dimension addresses a project’s strategic assessment of their environment, the development of a vision and strategic goal, the extent to which this vision informs the project’s activities, and the extent to which the project has actualised its vision in the period under review.

• Dimension 2 – Ownership & Control: This dimension looks at the degree to which community stakeholders participate at all levels of the project. It reviews the ownership model, participation in management, planning, reporting, reflecting and editorial/programming. This dimension makes an assessment of the extent of the projects engagement with its Development Eco-System, it looks at stakeholder mapping, partnerships and collaborations.

• Dimension 3 – Organisational & Financial Sustainability: This dimension assesses the strength and functionality of an organisation’s systems including governance and decision taking, human resource development, financial management, and critically, the ability of the project to develop and grow different income streams. 

• Dimension 4 – Quality Content: This dimension will assess the extent to which the project’s editorial/programming meets the information and expression needs of its community. It will assess the editorial/programming in terms of the representation of women and marginal groups in the community, bias towards institutions holding political, social, or economic power, the application of media ethics, accuracy and fairness in reporting, the spread of stories and sources, quality of presentation, and the extent to which the programming upholds and advances the values contained in South African Bill of Rights. 

Each of the CMI dimensions has been developed to include a number of sub-dimensions - each with its own set of indicators. These four dimensions can be represented on a graph matrix as presented here:

The CMI presents a set of indicators sufficiently standardised to allow for comparisons across a maximum number of projects while remaining flexible enough to accommodate the diversity of projects the sector encompasses as well as the various significant contextual differences. 

A number of participatory action-research tools facilitate the collection of data and can facilitate a participatory assessment of the data. Many of these tools are built on the ground broken by Keystone in the development of their Capabilities Profiler, Developing a Theory of Change, Learning with Stakeholders, Becoming Eco-Intelligent, and Public Reporting Framework (http://www.keystoneaccountability.org).

Once the initial assessment has been completed (represented by the solid red line in the diagram below), participatory action-planning tools will be deployed to develop goals and action steps based on the assessment. These goals/action steps are represented by the broken blue line in the following diagram: