The wind of change is blowing through the land of communication. After twenty years, the undisputed metaphor of the digital revolution - the web - is being overturned by a new more nuanced, poetic but equally powerful one: the cloud. Not just one, but many. A whole sky, full of bits. Clouds of data, applications, services. Ultimately, content clouds. Billions of data, sublimated and left free to fluctuate without any support and to condense whenever and wherever needed or desired.

That’s what the change is really about: the contents. Whether they are big data or creative projects, shared resources or life stories, “what” is becoming more relevant than “how”. After years of deterministic euphoria for the helpful power of media, the substance of information is the heart of the matter once again. A substance moving from place to place, yet remaining true to itself, while new marketing paradigms try to grasp, cage and maybe change it into more rigid models.

For citizens and Institutions, it means to understand how the role of public communication is evolving within the new communication cloud. For civil society and Institutions, it is about how to move along together in order to define new behavioural and dialogue models, more flexible but at the same time faithful to that “informational essence" the media superpower has nearly overshadowed for too many years.

However, today, the cover is transparent, if not totally disappeared, leaving its content free at last. It doesn’t matter if the substance released is nothing less than vapour, spread into thousands of streams and particles. It only means that it can become anything, adapting itself to possible futures. Free to sneak everywhere.