I agree that NIME is less welcoming to independent researchers than it could and should be, but my examples are different. I recently pointed out an unexpected example in a different thread: the CMT’s Domain Conflicts prompt not accepting an empty string or “none”. Presumably it was merely an oversight, but it’s revealing: the underlying assumption is that all participants must have at least one conflict because they’re academics.
A more serious example is the high cost of attendance. Academic participants rarely consider this, because universities generally pick up the cost of sending their students and faculty to conferences. For an independent researcher, the total cost–entrance fee, travel, room and board–can be quite significant. This leads to deferring participation until the conference is held in a country that’s reasonably close to the researcher’s own, in order to reduce travel costs (and CO2 emissions, though that certainly deserves its own topic).
The most far-reaching questions concern the role of conferences and journals in the dissemination of scientific research. Traditionally they’ve been gatekeepers, but the rise of self-publishing is rapidly changing the landscape. As I commented elsewhere on this forum, it’s already common for researchers to publish preprints on sites such as arXiv and Zenodo–particularly in math and physics–not just because it’s less time-consuming and expensive, but more importantly because it’s faster. Priority is often a zero-sum game, and things move fast in the 21st century. Independent researchers in particular rightly fear losing priority to better-funded academic competitors. That’s why I urged NIME to clarify its pre-print policy.