UNESCO is the lead UN agency in promoting freedom of expression and universal access to information and knowledge. UNESCO recognizes that Community-based media ensure media pluralism, diversity of content, and the representation of a society’s different groups and interests. Community media encourage open dialogue and transparency of administration at local level and offer a voice to the voiceless. They are established on the concepts of public access, sharing experiences and information.

One of the UNESCO’s goals is to identify some of the good practices available in the field of community media and share these practices with larger communities. In order to achieve the goal, UNESCO is convening a group of experts consisting of 16 community media researchers, practitioners, network leaders and representatives from associations/organizations selected worldwide are participating in the "Experts Consultative Meeting on Good Practices in Community Media" to be held from 9-11 February 2009 in UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, France.

The consultation meeting will focus on identifying good practices concerning community media throughout the world, especially in the domain of legislation, funding mechanisms/entrepreneurship options, technology choices, management and ownerships, programming, codes of practice, sustainable models, access, participation and other issues.

The meeting will design a framework to share the good practices identified and elaborated as a result of the consultation and develop a list of resource people/authors in the community media field who write on the identified topics.