FROM: Jim Brewer
To: The Strategic Planning Committee, OLELO
Hoard of Directors, 1122 Mapunapuna Street
Honolulu, Hawaii, 96819

Aloha,

I sincerely request and urge this committee and the full board to reconsider this preliminary strategic plan.

It is difficult to fathom how this formulation -- diametrically opposed to what public access television is all about -- has come to be. It is especially difficult for this person who celebrates daily the great advance in democracy the advent of public access television represented.

Just the titles of items 1), 2), 4) and 5) elicit responses ranging from concern and alarm to astonishment and dismay.

Item 3) is basically good but care has to be taken that all communities be served equitably and that the institutions that house remote facilities cannot get into a position where they can compromise the independence and freedom from bias of OLELO's basic function.

Item 1)'s title seems to indicate that the OLELO board and administration are going to decide which productions, producers and presenters are "relevant." The text of item 1 )is not bad, if the services and endeavors apply to all access users, "across-the-board" and on the same "level playing field."

Item 2) puts OLELO staff in the position of being a producer (in this case a co-producer) and in the position of judging which producers are worthy of special help, instead of across-the-board fairness to all persons and entities seeking to avail themselves of pubic access to the OLELO channels.

It becomes a conflict of interest for OLELO to be a producer when its basic function is to support and serve producers so that there is a plentiful supply of programs spontaneously originated by community producers.

Item 3) is basically good. Except that "partnering" compromises the independence OLELO even in the best of circumstances. There are just too many possibilities for deals that might not even seem like deals that would exclude from the cable-access forum those who were excluded from the media before the advent of "free speech TV."

But if a community entity chooses to permit an unbiased, independent OLELO to use its facilities, for reasons of its own, and with "no-strings-attached," that would probably be considered fair and OK by most people.

And, there's a great need to open facilities at places like the Waimanalo community and at Waipahu, Campbell, Castle, Kaimuki, Farrington, Mckinley and Roosevelt High Schools.

Item 4) is something that is a natural for community producers and was done in the past. And OLELO's function should be to find out why those producers burnt out, or left for other reasons and how they can be supported so that people will stay and new one's will come on board.

All kinds of weekly news in review is another thing that could be regular features and a great community service, but they are really not going to happen without the proper facility support... such as having two state-of-the-art teleprompters, etc..

It is a BAD idea for OLELO to change it's function of being a supporter of spontaneous community free speech producers to being a producer in competition with them.

Item 5) is another way that OLELO would seek to be a producer, deciding for the community who and what sources are best for cable access viewers. Again, the kinds of things referred to here could and should be coming from community producers who know that OLELO is open to these kinds of productions.

Please keep OLELO on the track of supporting the soapbox of free speech TV for people and points of views that are not necessarily popular with the mass market." And please do not allow all the funding to go to Education and Government who already have tremendous media clout. The "p" in P.E.G. is already too small.
 

ALOHA, Jim Brewer