Festival of Maintenance 2018

About the event

A one-day festival in London on Saturday 22/09/2018, bringing together maintainers to learn from and inspire each other.

Maintainers can be found in many contexts, including nature, software, infrastructure, communities, industry, information, arts and heritage. The Festival brings 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 Festival of Maintenance is a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, exploring and recognizing the often-hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter.

Why London?

2018 is the first year of the Festival – we hope there will be more! We really wanted to run it in the UK outside London, but all the advice we’ve had from folks who have run other volunteer and community events is that London is the best choice for the first year, to draw people in. We hope to balance this out with a satellite event at the same time at DoES Liverpool, where folks can gather to watch the Festival talks remotely.

Sponsors

Thank you to these organisations, without whose support this year’s Festival would not be possible.

Maker Assembly is a gathering of makers. They aim to make a home for critical discussion about maker culture: its meaning, politics, history and future.

Maintain our Heritage is a small not-for-profit group campaigning to get historic building owners and institutions to recognize the importance of the everyday, routine maintenance.