Open Tech Calendar

The Festival of Maintenance will be a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, recognising the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter.

Maintainers can be found in many contexts, including nature, software, infrastructure, communities, industry, information, arts and heritage. The Festival will bring together traditional disciplines of maintenance, repair and stewardship, with new forms such as supporting digital products, sustaining open source software, and moderating online communities. The Festival aims to share learning around maintainer skills and tools and how maintenance is resourced and rewarded, 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 stewards, building shared practices, and raising awareness more widely of the value of this work and where it sits within our society.

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