Below is a message you can use to contact people about OURMedia.

Clemencia Rodriguez

Associate Professor

Department of Communication

University of Oklahoma

610 Elm Avenue

Norman OK 73019 USA

405 325 1570

-----Original Message-----
From: Rodriguez, Clemencia
Sent: Friday, January 31, 2003 11:11 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: OURMedia

Dear friends of alternative media, community media, citizens' media, radical media (et al):

I am writing to invite you and/or your organization to join OURMedia, a network of alternative media scholars, practitioners, and activists (see our web page: http://faculty.menlo.edu/~jhiggins/ourmedia/). Our group meets once a year to discuss issues such as policy, research, evaluation, and networking pertaining to community media, alternative media, citizens' media and the like. We insist in the need to strengthen dialogue and discussion among academics and non-academics. In between meetings we collaborate in different types of activities such as research, participation in policy forums, etc. What follows is a short statement recently drafted by the group.

OUR MEDIA: STATEMENT OF PURPOSE

OURMedia is an emerging global network of scholars and practitioners concerned with the field of alternative, community, and citizens' media. It has emerged out of the Our Media Not Theirs meetings held in Washington D.C. in May 2001 and Barcelona in July 2002 and will continue to grow and diversify through future such meetings.
OURMedia is a network whose meetings, activities, and public representation (http://faculty.menlo.edu/~jhiggins/ourmedia/) are founded in agreement upon the following core principles:

all communities and collectives need to communicate, to express themselves, to inform and be informed, to dialogue with others, and to network. To have these communication needs met is the right of every community and collective. Every community and collective is entailed to the appropriate communication and information technologies and know-how to meet their historical communication needs;
access to and participation in the production and distribution of communication and information is unequal, often highly unequal in most places across the world; thus the struggles of people to contest such inequality and to broaden participation in communication and media processes must be supported;
a process must be created whereby scholars and practitioners can exchange information and ideas, collaborate on research studies, and develop recommendations to the global policy arena on communication, information, and media, in a way that could not be achieved by academics and practitioners working alone;
the purpose of OURMedia is to be one important, but not the exclusive, form of that process, operating through a continuous dialogue between theory and practice.

We recently participated in the third World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January of 2003. Currently we are in the process of discussing and planning our participation in different international forums such as the annual meeting of AMARC in Nepal in February of 2003, and the World Summit for the Information Society in Geneva in December of 2003. Please let me know if you are interested in joining our group by sending an e.mail to [log in to unmask]. We will then add your name and e.mail address to our webpage and listserv (listserv traffic is not overwhelming). Looking forward to including you in our network,