[Themaintainers] UK event planned: festival of maintenance

[Festival of Maintenance team]

All,

The Festival of Maintenance took place last month.

A report on the event, including a brief write up of content, audience
feedback and our financials:
https://medium.com/@lbjames/the-first-festival-of-maintenance-6a59932dba62

Audio recordings (almost all sessions):
https://festivalofmaintenance.wordpress.com/2018-event/

We hope to share slide decks from the speakers who used them, but are just
waiting on remaining permissions there.

thanks for your support and encouragement!

Best regards,

Laura



On Sun, 10 Jun 2018 at 21:16, Laura James <lbjames at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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