[Themaintainers] UK event planned: festival of maintenance

[Laura James]

All,

Just to confirm the date for this event -  the festival will be on Saturday
September 22nd in central London.

Best,

Laura

On Mon, 2 Apr 2018 at 09:23, Laura James <lbjames at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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