Introduction to the NIME Organisation

NIME Leaders Workshop Facilitators

How NIME actually works

NIME is a do-ocracy volunteer community

At NIME, the people doing all the stuff tend to choose how it works.

There’s lots of ways to contribute, but getting started usually means starting to do some stuff!

Where can you do this stuff and how?

The NIME board

What it does:

  • Decision-making and governing
  • Ensure the conference happens
  • Ensure the proceedings are available
  • Support committees + engage an Advisory Group
  • Work: online meetings + email decisions

Roles (mostly elected):

  • President, Chief of Committees
  • Proceedings + Continuity Officers
  • Member(s)-at-large
  • General Chairs (join via a hosting bid)

Join up: nominate or vote if you’ve attended 1 of the last 5 NIMEs.

Work in progress! The NIME board is relatively NEW (est. 2023); several seats are held by facilitators here today.

NIME committees

  • Ethics, Diversity, Environmental, WiNIME, LATAM
  • Representing specific interests and efforts for influencing NIME for the better
  • Join up: just ask the committee lead
  • Work looks like: emails and online meetings, help making decisions (esp. ethics committee).
  • Committees often start as research and advocacy: e.g., WiNIME grew from work on gender balance (Xambó, 2018)

Officers

Roles that keep NIME running between conferences:

  • Mailing list + forum officers
  • Mentorship Program
  • Sponsorship (currently unfilled, an open role!)

Join up: see the committees & officers list and ask.

The forum & mailing list

forum.nime.org

  • in-between NIME discussion
  • help with conference submissions
  • (friendly) arguments about publication formats
  • community-owned and run
  • exploring fediverse connections

Needs more activity!

NIME Mailing list

  • Google group
  • Traditional email mailing list
  • 2000+ members
  • mostly: conference calls and job postings
  • active moderators

Conference chairs

  • General Chairs (2x)

Track Chairs

  • Paper Chairs
  • Music Chairs
  • Poster/Demo Chairs
  • alt.nime Chairs
  • Workshop Chairs
  • Doctoral Consortium Chairs

Supporting Chairs

  • Hybrid
  • Accessibility
  • Student Volunteer
  • Web/Social

We Need Chairs

  • Hard but rewarding
  • Skills with CMT (Conference Management Toolkit)
  • Need for champions for initiatives like alt.nime
  • Need help recording on blogs/forum.

Meta-reviewers & reviewers

Reviewing is an act of caring (for authors and the community).

  • Meta-reviewers care more about more authors and the community
  • Critical for NIME’s success
  • Basic requirement: plenty of experience as an author and reviewer
  • Also need skills in communication, need to learn about CMT

Other roles

Invent your own roles

  • start doing something!
  • talk about it on the forum
  • send in a workshop submission to develop an idea

Examples

Where do you see yourself?

Talk: Which role(s) interest you now / in future? What would you bring?

Share back

Share: each table, name one role you’re drawn to and one barrier in the way.

  • Facilitators respond: demystify the role, name the support that already exists

References

Fasciani, S., & Goode, J. (2021). 20 NIMEs: Twenty years of new interfaces for musical expression. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.b368bcd5
Goode, J., & Fasciani, S. (2022). A toolkit for the analysis of the NIME proceedings archive. In A. McPherson & E. Frid (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression. https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.58efca21
Marquez-Borbon, A., & Stapleton, P. (2015). Fourteen years of NIME: The value and meaning of “community” in interactive music research. In E. Berdahl & J. Allison (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 307–312). Louisiana State University. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1179128
McPherson, A. P., Berdahl, E., Lyons, M. J., Jensenius, A. R., Bukvic, I. I., & Knudson, A. (2016). NIMEhub: Toward a repository for sharing and archiving instrument designs. NIME2016 Workshop Track. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/106438
Wanderley, M. (2023). Prehistoric NIME: Revisiting research on new musical interfaces in the computer music community before NIME. In M. Ortiz & A. Marquez-Borbon (Eds.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 60–69). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11189104
Xambó, A. (2018). Who are the women authors in NIME?–improving gender balance in NIME research. In T. M. Luke Dahl Douglas Bowman (Ed.), Proceedings of the international conference on new interfaces for musical expression (pp. 174–177). Virginia Tech. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1302535