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 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:

There’s a general gap considering a number of social dimensions such as ethnicity, disability, gender, and so on that reflects our society as a whole. These dimensions should be better included in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, as explained in this article on "5 Numbers That Explain Why STEM Diversity Matters to All of Us".
For example, there's a large gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, which includes audio engineering, music technology, sound and music computing (SMC), music information retrieval (MIR), new interfaces for musical expression (NIME), and related academic fields, as well as in creative industries, such as the electronic music industry and music festivals.
#metoo and recent studies on sexual harassment in creative industries, student life and academia are proofs of deep, problematic structures that leads to discrimination, harassment and other inequality. This is the reasoning behind our CoC, but also the need to acknowledge, discuss and take action towards the social structures that lead to discrimination and inequality, through our overarching diversity topic.

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: