On behalf of the NIME Steering Committee (SC), I am excited to announce that we have developed a new governance for our community. The NIME SC will be replaced by a new governing body, the NIME Board. The SC has been working for several months on crafting the Terms of Reference for this new board. I am happy to communicate that this document is now available on the NIME website at nime.org/board.
In the document, you will find detailed information about the rationale for devising a new governing structure. Briefly, the main motivations are:
To offer active and passionate members the opportunity to contribute to NIME, whether or not they organised a NIME conference
To ensure more continuity between successive editions of the conference
To create a more rigorous governance model to account for the community’s growth while avoiding fragmentation among the numerous bottom-up initiative
As you will see in the document, different roles are open for community members to fill in. In the next few weeks, we will communicate the election modalities for board members on the forum.
I suggest that you include a bit more detail in the board terms of reference:
mechanism for removing members: it’s conceivable that a board member may need to be removed (for instance in case of severe misconduct at a NIME conference which is not unheard of in many academic communities). A simple mechanism would be a clause to clarify that a board member can be removed by resolution at a meeting.
definition for what is necessary for making a resolution at a meeting (e.g., what is the quorum of attending board members, is a simple majority enough?)
definition of who can vote in elections. You have defined eligibility to run as attending one of the past three NIME conferences, could this be extended to eligibility to vote? Playing devil’s advocate, what if someone makes fake accounts with fake names to stack the vote?
I think the rules could be a bit tighter honestly as this is the only document really starting to define what being a member of NIME community means or could mean and justifying how decision might be made.
Look for example at the by-laws of ISMIR (based on Canada’s rules) or ACMA (based on Victoria, Australia’s rules).
I can understand the need to have perhaps the slimmest rules possible given NIME’s unincorporated model but a few more details would assist in cases of future dispute.
The first task of the new Board will be to revise the document, and these are all excellent points that the Board will need to consider.
The urgent matter is around eligibility to vote. As I will write in a dedicated post soon, voters must have attended at least one of the past three conferences. I have the list of registrants from NIME 2021-2023 so that would be an easy check and would prevent fraudolent votes (I believe).