Reflections on Online Publication Ecosystems: Three Case Studies
It is an honour to be part of the NIME workshop NIME Publication Ecosystem Workshop, to be held next week on Tuesday 21 July, 2020. This workshop is organised by Alexander Refsum Jensenius (University of Oslo), Andrew McPherson (Queen Mary University of London), Anna Xambó (De Montfort University), Charles Martin (Australian National University), Jack Armitage (Queen Mary University of London), Niccolò Granieri (Birmingham City University), Rebecca Fiebrink (University of the Arts London) and Luiz Naveda (State University of Minas Gerais).
This workshop is a follow-up of previous discussions at NIME, such as NIMEHub in 2016 and Open NIME in 2019, with the aim at discussing publication strategies that can improve the NIME publication ecosystem looking forward.
In preparation for the NIME 2020 Publication Ecosystem Workshop, the workshop organisers and attendees have been invited to share their thoughts beforehand à la flipped classroom. This is due to moving the workshop to an online and distributed setting, which is in alignment with the whole NIME 2020 conference. With this approach, we hope to have more focused discussions during the plenary sessions.
For this reason, I have produced the following video where I reflect on three experiences related to online publication ecosystems: The Proceedings of the Web Audio Conference 2019, the WoNoMute’s online archive, and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Live Interfaces 2020.
From this workshop, I expect that we can discuss potential solutions that bring a balance between promoting high quality / curated publications and bringing more diversity and inclusion into the NIME publication ecosystem. It is an open question whether there exists a sustainable and embracing solution that can include different mediums of publication. A potential challenge is to find a low-maintenance but effective solution based on the available resources. Hopefully, this workshop can be a useful mechanism to take decisions forward based on the community’s voices towards this vision of an open NIME publication ecosystem. I’m looking forward to the workshop and discussions!