Ronny Adhikarya left a comment in “About” that thrilled me no end. For those of you who are not directly working in the field of development communication, Ronny is my guru. He is the father of strategic extension campaigns and I worship the ground he walks on because he is the expert. He has written these landmark books in media campaigns: Motivating Farmers for Action: How Strategic Multi-Media Campaigns Can Help published by GTZ and Strategic Extension Campaign: A Participatory-Oriented Method of Agricultural Extension published by FAO.

These two books are a must-read for those of us working in communication — mass communication, development communication, agricultural extension, marketing and advertising. They provide some of the theoretical basis for the principles we use to design media campaigns aimed to bring about behavioral change.

I wrote a bit about him in an earlier post on “How to develop a communication strategy”. I hope he won’t mind if I say that when we were at the East-West Center in Honolulu some 35 years ago, he was a young guy who wore jeans and drove a sports car with a rolled up beach mat stashed under the seat. Whenever I walked by his office at Lincoln Hall, he would often engage me in a discussion on population and communication issues, which was the work I used to do before I went to Hawaii. Then, I used to wonder how he could be so obsessed with intellectual stuff when Hanauma Bay was beckoning. But that’s how Ronny was.

Many years later our paths crossed again when Ronny, as senior FAO extension officer, was backstopping the FAO Intercountry Rice Integrated Pest Control Programme coordinated by Peter Kenmore. That one got me into the mainstream of communication campaigns and introduced me to IRRI. For all this, I want to say to Ronny and Peter: Mahalo!

Welcome Ronny to Devcompage. I hope you will post comments to share your insights and clarify some of the issues that are tackled here.