Community media such as free radios work in local and regional spaces, but they are also new network nodes for translocal, European and international activities. They are often docking points for language groups for which there are no adequate local offers. In addition to the narrow goals of improving the quality of teaching, organisation and editorial work, the project should also raise awareness of European cooperation between citizens with different cultural and biographical backgrounds. different cultural and biographical backgrounds. As the financial resources available for community media are often scarce, it is of high importance to learn about efficient but also creative methods in the field of critical media literacy. The aim is to develop a shared vision of community media engagement and education as learning spaces for intercultural communication, participation and empowerment. COMMIT collected the experiences and suggestions gained and fed them into different series of events. In addition, the results flow into the accompanying research on community media in Austria, which COMMIT plays a major role in shaping, e.g. in the current ÖÄW research project "MeDeMap".
In many European countries, community media form a separate area within adult education with their focus on media education, strengthening social participation and promoting multilingualism and social inclusion. They are low-threshold learning places for the acquisition of multiple competences in the context of lifelong learning and have great potential to motivate especially educationally disadvantaged people to learn. Participatory media design always means learning. The challenge, however, is to consistently support the designers involved in their competence and media practice in their further development. Against the background of the current discussions about information disorder, fake news, filterblades and echo chambers and the concept of the "editorial society" suggested by Pörksen (2018), this potential gains enormous importance for adult education and its contribution to empowering citizens in the age of social media platforms. The experiences and insights contribute to improvements in three areas: Conception and design of editorial processes, improvement of management skills, design and further development of educational offers.