Organiser Reflections — Hosting & Running NIME

Background reading mainly for “So, you want to propose a NIME…”, with a back-end strand that also supports knowledge of the support roles support roles and committees and community-led initiatives. There is no single proceedings paper on hosting NIME, so this collects first-hand reflections, official guidance, and community discussion from previous organisers.

First-hand host & chair reflections

• Charles Martin — “On hosting NIME2025 in Canberra” (6 Feb 2026). A general chair’s reflection on what NIME2025 (ANU, Canberra) produced, what was achieved, and who made it happen. https://charlesmartin.au/blog/2026/02/06/on-hosting-nime2025-in-canberra
• Ivica Ico Bukvic — “NIME 2018” (2018). A general chair’s retrospective on bringing NIME 2018 to Virginia Tech after a competitive bid: ~250 participants from 27 countries, a ~$120K budget (≈70% from registration), diversity efforts (keynote line-up, Women in Music Technology), and reflections on nurturing a large volunteer-run committee across institutions. The most concrete look at the realities (budget, logistics) on this list. https://ico.bukvic.net/main/nime-2018/
• Courtney N. Reed — NIME / CHIME 2024 reflection (3 Dec 2024). Facilitator Courtney Reed reflects on serving as Paper Chair (with Astrid Bin) at NIME 2024 Utrecht — “the amount of passion, labour, and dedication that go into conferences” — alongside her own presentations. Useful for the chair-role perspective (mostly participation, with a paper-chair reflection). https://www.courtneynreed.com/blog/2024/nimechime/

Official guidance for prospective hosts

• NIME Hosting page — the concrete scaffold for the “plan a NIME in an hour” activity: the required proposal components, review criteria (venue, team, theme, diversity, environmental impact, financial feasibility), and current regional priorities for bids. https://nime.org/hosting/
• NIME hosting proposal template — https://github.com/nime-conference/nime-hosting-proposal-template/
• NIME Cookbook — operational guidance for chairs and committees (some sections may be out of date). https://github.com/NIME-conference/NIME-cookbook
• Example NIME 2025 proposal — a worked example to model against. https://github.com/smcclab/nime2025-proposal-example

Community discussion on the future of hosting

• “Note on future NIMEs” (NIME Forum) — Fabio Morreale, on behalf of the Steering Committee, sets out five requirements for future hosts (motivated local team + institutional support; supportive academic/cultural environment; accessibility for non-affiliated contributors; financial and ecological sustainability, especially travel; recognition of a geographically and economically diverse community). The thread also discusses hub-based, lower-carbon conference models and their trade-offs (with Alex McLean / yaxu). https://forum.nime.org/t/note-on-future-nimes/344

Directories & initiatives

• WiNIME — Women in NIME directory — a public database of women authors in NIME, useful for finding panellists, keynote speakers, committee members, reviewers, and advisory-board candidates. Grew out of Xambó’s work on gender balance (Xambó, 2018). https://annaxambo.me/directory-of-winime/

NIME organisation & back-end workshops (a lineage)

A series of community workshops, led by Alexander Refsum Jensenius and collaborators, worked on NIME’s back-end: how the community publishes, archives, and shares its diverse outputs (papers, code, hardware, performances). A good model for Session 3 of how an initiative is launched and maintained over years, and useful background for the proceedings/archive roles in Session 1.

• NIMEhub: Toward a Repository for Sharing and Archiving Instrument Designs
  2016. — the start of the lineage. McPherson, Berdahl, Lyons, Jensenius, Bukvic & Knudson propose a community database for digital musical instrument designs, tackling reproducibility and the role of custom hardware. (Facilitator Andrew McPherson is lead author.) http://hdl.handle.net/10919/106438
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius — “Workshop: Open NIME” (7 Jun 2019, NIME 2019, Porto Alegre) — with co-organisers from QMUL, NTNU, Aalborg, IRCAM, Virginia Tech, Goldsmiths and UFRGS. On transparency and access: CC-BY licensing, open peer review, repositories for code/data/performances (Zenodo, OSF), FAIR principles, and NIME-specific platforms. Aimed at recommendations to pilot in
  2020. https://www.arj.no/2019/06/07/workshop-open-nime/
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius — “NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop” (13 Aug 2020, online) — building on NIMEHub (2016) and Open NIME (2019): a publication ecosystem spanning textual and non-textual outputs (hardware, code, performances, installations), archival solutions, metadata/BibTeX, a possible journal, and long-term maintainability for a volunteer community. Outcome: a dedicated discussion thread on the NIME forum. https://www.arj.no/2020/08/13/nime-ecosystem/

Proceedings, format, and infrastructure

• Alexander Refsum Jensenius — “Structuring NIME content” (16 Jul 2021) — on organising and archiving conference content across tracks. https://www.arj.no/2021/07/16/nime-content/
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius — “Running a hybrid conference” (27 Jun 2021) — practical notes on hybrid format (written about the RPPW workshop, so adjacent to NIME rather than about it directly). https://www.arj.no/2021/06/27/hybrid-conference/