I just read this wisdom from the most popular Medium post of the day:

Psychologist Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that you are 42 percent more likely to achieve your goals just by writing them down.

So here we go: I have just started my work on my next book:

“Public Media for Social Change” (working title).

The project is, in fact, a part of a bigger effort to rethink access, content, and impact in the new global media/comm tech landscape.
Background:
As a scholar, I have worked in public broadcasting as well as studied public service media around the world. For almost a decade now, some colleagues and I have been discussing the necessary shift from public media de jure (institutions) to different models of public media de facto. In this new environment, we feel, old institutions can’t respond to the societal challenges alone, or remain sustainable. New networked forms may be to temporary and too niche-focused to grain the kind of traction needed for social change. Yet, at the same time, commercialization of the Net and simultaneous government pressures threaten free expression and necessary knowledge for citizenry. Hence, new models and ideas of collaboration and multistakeholderisms are needed.

Book project:
I aim to collect success stories where institutional meets the situational, old media meets new platforms, different stakeholders collaborate, in the quest for sustainable social change. These are examples beyond social media-fuelled organizing or protests; more about the community-building, citizen-focused inclusive communication that aims to connect people to learn, discuss and debate common issues (the original ideal of public media).

I hope these cases, from around the world, will lead to a grounded theory of new models of public media de facto.

The manuscript will be ready by late Spring 2016.

(I have earlier written about public media and multi-stakeholderism, and am currently working on an article re: public media in the light of human rights and information and communication rights, as well as another one on the connections between public media and media reform and internet rights movements.)

Related initiatives:
I’m a member of the RIPE network of public service media professionals (managers, strategists, scholars). Until the 2012, the network focused mainly on Europe and North America. Since its conference in Sydney (@2012), RIPE has begun to make a real effort to globalize public media conversations. The Open Society Foundations have supported that process with some grants.

One of the grants projects is a global network of academic and applied researchers working in the field, an initiative I am helping with. This will first be realized as a pilot, a contact repository  for people to find like-minded scholars for exchange of information and future projects. Here’s a newsletter update where we are after a couple of months of network-building. The pilot repository will be completed at the end of this year.  After that, we hope to collaborate with others, the EBU included, to extend the repository to all kinds of institutions and organizations, projects, policy-makers, advocacy organizations, etc.

Stay tuned for more.