Together with the Russian exile medium Radio Sakharov, beabee is developing a prototype for a participation and membership software. The project ‘beabee for media in exile’ is intended to become a blueprint for exile and threatened media worldwide and is funded by the Babelsberg Media Innovation Centre.
More and more media around the world are being forced to work from exile. This presents them with enormous challenges. They have to reach people in their home country and in the diaspora at the same time; they have to produce relevant content for these communities and establish a functioning business model.
Exile media and their communities are under constant pressure and need a digital infrastructure that allows them to operate securely and confidently. This includes secure ways of communicating with the community, enabling participation and processing payments. With ‘beabee for media in exile’, we want to give exile media this digital sovereignty in building their community.
The prototype for this is being created with Radio Sakharov, which was founded by former employees of the Sakharov Centre in Moscow. Based in Berlin, the team produces Russian-language podcasts and publishes them on its own platform. ‘We need a digital space where we can work together with our community and which the Russian government can’t take away from us,’ says Polina Filipova, former deputy director of the Sakharov Centre and producer of Radio Sakharov.
beabee for media in exile’ is funded by the Babelsberg Media Innovation Centre. With its funding programmes, the MIZ regularly supports technically innovative projects that make journalism and the media world fit for the future and contribute to solving current challenges in the industry.
New security feature
While most platforms combine community monetisation and content publishing, we believe that funding models such as donation funding need to be coupled with creative community building methods to realise their full potential. We are therefore focussing on the development of tools for secure communication and collaboration with community members.
beabee already combines the functionalities of a user database (CRM), participation tools such as surveys and a payment module for a membership model. With ‘beabee for media in exile’, we will also focus on expanding security features such as two-factor authentication.
Blueprint for media in exile
‘beabee for media in exile’ is not just a tech project. Radio Sakharov will use beabee to establish a membership model and test creative participation formats for its communities in Russia and the diaspora.
The collaboration will create a blueprint for other media in exile or in unfree media markets. Further down the line, we hope to work with organisations that support media in exile and at risk.