Policy initiatives by civil society networks have recently led to radical transformations of existing legislation in the field of information and communication. In several countries of Latin America, more transparent and participatory regulatory mechanisms have been created, and community media has been legalized there as well as in parts of South Asia and Africa. Further north, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative aims to facilitate online and investigative journalism, and large mobilizations in Europe have helped to re-open debates on data retention. Networks such as the World Association of Community Broadcasters, media organizations such as WikiLeaks, and national as well as regional civil society coalitions have initiated such policy efforts, addressing both infrastructural and access issues. In this paper we focus on the experiences of several civil society coalitions and networks that have promoted policy change. We use the above-mentioned success stories as a starting point to explore common characteristics of diverse sets of actors and agendas that are situated partly at the center and partly at the margins of current information governance activism. We look at the following three aspects: 1. Organizational forms and action repertoires: What structural forms and action repertoires do social actors adopt? The wide range of actors that mobilize on information governance issues include non-governmental organizations, traditional ‘social movement organizations’, epistemic communities, but also more informal, temporary and precarious networks. We will investigate how actors may mobilize ‘inside’, ‘outside’, or ‘beyond’ policy arenas and established norms, and what role combinations of action repertoires as well as actor types may play. 2. Crisis and political change: Why have these initiatives been successful, and what conclusions do they provide for other civil society campaigns in the information governance field? We will see how social actors have strategically exploited political opportunities of political change and crisis. We will analyze their mobilization and advocacy efforts, identify differences to civil society interventions on debates such as ACTA, and extract a set of characteristics for successful policy campaigns. 3. Policy agendas: What connections can we draw between current key agenda points in information governance, such as intellectual property, net neutrality and privacy protection, and other media concerns, for example for broadcast spectrum and journalist protection? Do the initiatives that we analyze provide starting-points for combining concerns from ''old'' and ''new'' media platforms, and thereby overcome divisions between different sets of policies (as well as between different social groups mobilizing on them), or do they remain disconnected? Research for this paper is based on in-depth qualitative interviews with members of various policy initiatives, and draws on results from distinct research projects on policy change in the field of media, information and communication.
