OURMedia is an emerging global network of scholars and practitioners concerned with the field of alternative, community, and citizens' media. It started out of the "Our Media, Not Theirs" meetings held in Washington D.C. in May 2001 and continues to grow and diversify through on-going meetings.

OURMedia is a network whose meetings, activities, and public representation 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.