Secret Radio Project is not a secret. Next April, 89.5 FM WBEW, one of Chicago Public Radio’s three frequencies will begin a completely new and ambitious format. Most of the content will be user-generated.

“What if we had no shows? With no packaged comments?” Torey Malatia, president and general manager of CPR, asked TimeOut Chicago in an interview earlier this year. The answer? Nobody knows.

Without typical hour-long programs, the noncommercial station will instead rely on hosts to navigate two-hour time blocks based on their own musings, but they will be expected to incorporate user audio as well.

What makes Secret Radio Project so ambitious is that it takes the infrastructure of cyber-community involvement — Secret Radio Project relies on YouTube uploading and a blog-esque style — and adapts it to a radio station serving a geographic community. The goal is to reach those people in Chicago who do not fit into the narrow demographic — white, older, educated — already listening to WBEZ, and it will take every tool and technique available to make it happen.

“As a public broadcasting station, we commission lots of market research to see who listens to public radio and who doesn’t,” said Daniel Ash, vice president of communications for CPR.

“Our mandate is to serve the area of license, our region, all of Chicago. Looking at the demographic of our wonderful listeners, we see it does not reflect the demographics of our region. There is not the diversity that we want.

So we asked those who didn’t listen…to tell us what they thought. One thing was enormously clear: there are people who are engaged and care about their community, who should—for all purposes—listen to 915 FM WBEZ,” Ash said. “But they don’t.”

It’s the conundrum most news outlets are facing: people care about their communities, but they are not engaged in the news.

The study asked non-listeners to keep diaries of when they tuned in, Ash said. “They all said, ‘This is good stuff.’…They were learning new things, things they need to know and things they haven’t heard, but they would say, ‘Man, you’re hard to listen to,’” Ash said. In short, the host never grabbed them.

The big question about Secret Radio Project is if people will actually upload content. If a host can create a level of trust in the space—and people actively want to please the host—then the format could work well.

But it will take more than trust to cover all of Chicago and get people to participate in creating content. An infrastructure of entry points into the new station, where people can learn about it and create their own audio content, must be created. Besides audio content people will be able to write blogs and participate in forums too. (The server to upload audio content will go online early next year so people can start sending it in early.) But in a community as diverse—culturally, socially and, most importantly, economically—the Internet will not be the best place for many of the citizens Secret Radio Project will try and reach.

That’s why CPR will open three community bureaus in the city by April: Northwest Indiana, Humboldt Park and Englewood, where citizens can come and record content for the station. They plan to add three more additional offices within three years. CPR will also hold entertainment events, community discussions and public debates in order to begin the process of getting people involved in the new station.

But no matter what CPR does—or, at this stage in the game, talk about—one thing is for certain: the project will swing on whether people participate. And that’s why Ash is confident this ambitious project without any real precedent will start in April. “It’s going to evolve. It will have to in order to mirror the region,” he said. “We’re not trying to create something perfect. It can’t be.”

Matt Weir is a student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. He writes a media criticism blog for Medill and edits the news at Tinymixtapes.com, an online music magazine.