Diversity

Diversity


Call for Diversity

Diversity Tickets

We have a limited number of diversity tickets available to attend the Web Audio Conference 2019 in Trondheim (4-6 December, 2019), thanks to our sponsors. This may cover your conference ticket and/or travels as an author or other attender. We have also tried to keep the conference fees as low as possible to encourage interested attendees to come. For additional information about registration fees, visit WAC 2019 Registration.

The diversity tickets will be prioritized for attendees from lower-income countries and backgrounds, and underrepresented communities in web audio.

To be eligible, you need to fill in the WAC 2019 Call for Diversity Online Survey (no longer available) telling us how we can help you, which should take 5-10 minutes.

An expert diversity committee is constituted who will decide from the candidates by September 15, 2019.

Important dates

  • September 8, 2019 (Anywhere on Earth): Deadline diversity tickets application.
  • September 15-17, 2019: Notification of grantees.
  • September 22, 2019: Deadline early-bird ticket.
  • December 4-6, 2019: The conference.

Please do not hesitate to contact the diversity committee, diversity@wac2019.ntnu.no if you have questions.

For additional information about the diversity theme, visit WAC 2019 Diversity Theme.

Diversity Theme

The theme for the fifth edition of the Web Audio Conference (WAC) is Diversity in Web Audio. We particularly encourage submissions focusing on inclusive computing, cultural computing, postcolonial computing, and collaborative and participatory interfaces across the web in the context of generation, production, distribution, consumption and delivery of audio material that especially promote diversity and inclusion. This can take the form of papers, oral presentations, demos, posters, performances, workshops, tutorials, or satellite events.

What does diversity mean for WAC?

WAC has a social and productive understanding of diversity:

  • The social understanding addresses the various and complex social dimensions intersecting with underlying structures in society that may lead to exclusion or other discrimination of such social dimensions. As shown in the diversity wheel below, this can include many different visible and invisible characteristics of a person.
  • The productive understanding of diversity (understood as creative asset as opposed to a capitalistic asset) in web audio can stimulate creativity and productivity in the creation of technology and products, by acknowledging the different backgrounds and experiences of our community members. This has been researched in diversity management. This has been the motivation to configure our committee this year.

Motivation

Our motivation for bringing more diversity into web audio includes the following reasons:

Diversity wheel

The center of the colourful wheel of diversity represents dimensions that are usually most permanent or visible. The outside of the wheel represents dimensions that are acquired and change over the course of a lifetime. The combinations of all of these dimensions influence our values, beliefs, behaviors, experiences and expectations and make us all unique as individuals.

Diagram of the diversity wheel

Contact

If you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop us a line at diversity@wac2019.ntnu.no

Pre-submission Draft Feedback

Given that this year's conference theme is Diversity in Web Audio, we would like to welcome everyone to submit. We realize that those individuals who are independent from academic institutions might feel intimidated in the submission process. A number of submissions from individuals outside institutions often have great ideas and novel perspectives, but miss the experience of academic writing. We would like to take action in lowering the barrier to entry and encourage submissions from a wider variety of backgrounds. We would like to make people feel more confident, supported and welcome regarding submitting.

With this goal, we propose a pre-submission draft feedback process where voluntary reviewers will give anonymous feedback to submission drafts.

Those interested should send their drafts at diversity@wac2019.ntnu.no and write a paragraph about yourselves that provides evidence that you are not associated with any institution. Although this is a single-blind conference (reviewers know who are the authors), we will make sure that the reviewers are not assigned the same paper in the reviewing process to keep the reviewing process as neutral as possible. The pre-submission draft feedback will be available until June 9 so there is time for the reviewers to read the draft and provide feedback, and also time for the author to address the feedback.  

We acknowledge that this action is an experiment that hopelly works out and becomes a successful pilot that can be trialled at larger events in the future!

Impact

Here's a list of blog post written after the WAC 2019 conference that showcase the impact of the conference and the importance of the diversity tickets:

Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Logo fo Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering Logo for Sono Suite

Diversity Sponsors

Logo for Roli      Logo for Mozilla
 

Bronze Sponsors

Logo for Ableton     Logo for Native Instruments Logo for Spotify     

In collaboration with

In collaboration with

 

NTNU Department of Music logo
Trondheim Kommune logo
Rockheim logo SALTO logo

WoNoMute logo

Cinemateket logo