[Themaintainers] UK event planned: festival of maintenance

[Laura James]

All,

You may be interested in a one-day festival of maintenance being planned in
the UK later this year. Details below.

This will showcase practitioners of maintenance in all its forms, across
both traditional repair and stewardship, and emerging work around software
and digital communities and sharing. The (non-profit) festival is being
organised by a small group of volunteers - do get in touch if you are able
to help out, or can connect us to potential sponsors and supporters.

Best regards,

Laura


https://twitter.com/MaintenanceFest
festivalofmaintenance at gmail.com




The Festival of Maintenance will be a celebration of those who maintain
different bits of our world, and how they do it.

Maintainers can be found in many contexts, including nature, software,
infrastructure, communities, industry, information, arts and heritage.  The
Festival aims to bring together traditional disciplines of maintenance and
repair with new forms such as supporting digital products, sustaining open
source software, moderating forums and more.

Maintaining, repairing and sustaining can be challenging in a fast-moving
era, where this work can be seen as boring and low value, compared to the
excitement around inventing or making new things. It is easy to forget that
apps, data and connected systems need maintenance too, if they are to
realise their potential and be useful or fun for more than a brief moment.
It can be hard to find good resourcing models for long-lasting products, or
for looking after new forms of shared infrastructure (such as open source
software libraries). Strong commons models, where groups share and steward
resources (whether the knowledge in Wikipedia or open hardware designs) are
scarce or difficult to replicate.  Austerity has cut the funding available
for maintenance of many local assets, such as libraries or parks. Care work
is poorly rewarded, both economically and socially, whether caring for
people face to face, or supporting online communities. Information such as
video and data from recent decades is already lost or inaccessible.

At the Festival of Maintenance, the people, motivations, practices and
support around maintenance in these areas will be made visible.  We will
recognise the work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and
caring for things that matter. We will also explore agency and liability in
maintenance, the systems and structures that shape power around the choices
of what to sustain and how to do this, and the interplay of maintenance
with innovation.

Bringing together pioneers experimenting with new ways to build and
maintain physical and digital goods and systems, and established
maintainers, repairers, and stewards, the Festival of Maintenance will
focus on practice and lived experience, and how we can support maintainers
better.

Topics will include: software and dataset maintenance, online and offline
communities, design for repair and reuse, physical and digital commons,
infrastructure, co-ops and crowd-sourcing, risks and liabilities around
repair and reuse, “-as-a-service” business models, new funding structures,
voluntary and paid maintenance.

The Festival aims to share learning and practice around how maintenance is
resourced and rewarded, maintainer skills and tools, and to boost the
morale of maintainers across sectors with inspiring ideas and stories.

The 2018 Festival of Maintenance will start a lasting conversation across
communities of maintainers and those around them, building shared
practices, and raising awareness more widely of the value of this work and
where it sits within our society.
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