This month's theme is hydrography and living resources. However, you won't find any articles on the subject in this magazine. A bit strange coming from me, who for years worked in nature conservation. Like a doctor not seeing his own kid is ill, or a contractor not working on his own house in his spare time. But I haven't developed a blind spot for living resources, just sometimes a theme comes up that's too interesting too ignore. In promising to make it up to you over living resources, I would like to introduce Hydrography 2.0!

Invite you into a changing media landscape, one leading to a different future. Let's start by looking at our own Hydro International, no longer just a magazine, but a platform - magazine, newsletter and website - providing daily coverage of all you need to know in the field of hydrography. For fast news updates you can use the website or news headlines on Twitter (@hydro_intl) or find them though our LinkedIn group Hydrography (458 members). Hydro is now delivered to 179 countries, so if English isn't your native language you can make use of the Google translation tool on our website.

But, most important change of all, communication is no longer one way. You are encouraged to comment on news and articles, provide technical feedback on product overviews to help developers and other users. And this is only a small taste of things to come.

The changing media arise from the opportunities for personal intervention offered by the mobile phone and internet. Your voice may be heard and can make a difference. However, as Clay Shirky comments in his internet talk (81), this is not about technical, but social capital: ‘These tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn't when the shining new tools show up that their users start creating society; it's when everybody is able to take them for granted.' So a crowd with these tools can use Twitter to report a tsunami, way ahead of official institutions. This is a new media landscape teeming with innovation. We are, says Shirky, experiencing the biggest increase in expressive capability in human history. Comparable to other revolutions: the printing press, telephony, sound and photography, and radio and television.

Also undergoing rapid evolution is the mapping and charting world. As the two-part feature ‘Citizen Mapping and Charting' (pages 14 and 26) explains: while mapping was long the domain of skilled mapmakers, now it is increasingly in the hands of the lay public, sometimes resulting in better maps. The media landscape as we once knew it is slipping away, in its place are multimedia carrying less the message from a single individual, more the voices of the many. This is where we find ourselves; the question is how to deal with it.

On Hydro it means that we, the editorial team, will no longer make unilateral decisions regarding the content for next year, but invite you, the reader community, to come up with subjects or themes you would like to see covered in these pages. Not the last change, only the first of many.