Our 2018 speakers
Simon Elmer
Simon Elmer is co-founder and co-director of Architects for Social Housing. He will be talking about the relative financial, social and environmental costs of estate demolition and redevelopment, which is current government, GLA and local authority policy, versus the benefits of refurbishment and infill, and showing why the former always leads to the social cleansing of the existing community.
Natalie Kane
Natalie D Kane is curator of digital design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and one-half of research project Haunted Machines. She’ll be talking on how the adult nappy can help us think about broken and wonky systems of care, assistance and bodily autonomy.
Watch Natalie’s session
Alanna Irving
Alanna Irving is a builder of participatory software enabling radical collaboration, especially with money. She will be talking about maintainers as leaders, and the importance of recognizing them as such. Alanna developed Full Circle Leadership as a framework for understanding the diverse forms leadership takes in collaborative groups.
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David Edgerton
David Edgerton is the author of The Shock of the Old and will be talking about the neglected importance of maintenance in our understanding of technology in the past and present.
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Hazel Forsyth
Hazel Forsyth, Senior Curator of the Medieval & Early Modern Collections at the Museum of London will talk about ‘Patches, Kettles and Petticoats’ – maintaining life in pre-industrial England.
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Alex Mecklenburg
Alex Mecklenburg is a co-founder at Truth & Spectacle, a consultancy that helps organisations own their creativity as a business function for innovation and growth. She is also an executive coach and a creator and facilitator of leadership programmes as associate of Doteveryone. Alex will be talking about one of her pet hates: that most organisations are fascinated with “fixing” things. Things move fast when stuff or people seem broken. Fixers get airtime and budget. But hardly anybody wants to be known as the “Maintainer” and maintenance budgets are notoriously tight.
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Mike Green
Mike Green, Chairman of the Central London Maintenance Association and experienced facilities management consultant, will share insights from the world of corporate outsourced maintenance, including the huge changes current and future technology will bring.
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Cambridge’s Guerrilla Groundsman
The Guerrilla Groundsman will be talking about his underground maintenance campaign in Cambridge, secretly fixing things in public places: Random Acts of Tidying.
Watch the Groundsman’s session
Lauren Hutchinson
Lauren Hutchinson is Managing Director of Oxford Hackspace, Core Organizer for the UK Hackspace Foundation, a lifelong equality and minorities activist, and an American Sign Language community mod. She is learning electronics while herding six packs of cats. She will talk about burnout, bullying, and low emotional quotient communities, and share thoughts on what maintainers can do to safeguard and heal their communities and themselves.
Adrian McEwen
Adrian McEwen co-founded the DoES Liverpool makerspace and will be sharing how they repurpose digital tools to manage and maintain the community’s equipment and workspace.
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Oliver Holtaway
Oliver Holtaway works as a communications consultant for social enterprises and helped to make Bath City FC a community-owned football club. He will talk about the challenges that people running community-owned clubs face in keeping the show on the road after the initial excitement of a community takeover campaign.
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Andrew Nesbitt
Andrew Nesbitt is a software developer based in Somerset. He’ll be talking about some of the problems with unseen open source infrastructure and the movement to make it more sustainable.
Chris Mills
Chris Mills manages the MDN writers’ team at Mozilla and will be weaving a tale of web standards, web browsers, and how MDN is vital to helping developers build a web that’s as accessible and open as can be.
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Daria Cybulska
Daria Cybulska is Head of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, an open knowledge charity. She will be exploring themes of knowledge maintenance, peering under the bonnet of Wikipedia’s hidden processes and uncovering the work of thousands of Wikipedia volunteer editors.
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Lee Vinsel
Lee Vinsel is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, and will address how unhelpful ways of thinking and talking about innovation lead us to neglect maintenance and maintainers. Lee co-organizes The Maintainers.
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Chris Hellawell
Chris Hellawell is the Founder of the Edinburgh Tool Library, the first library of it’s kind in the UK, and will be talking about how maintenance of things goes hand in hand with maintenance of the soul.
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Jake Harries
Jake Harries is Director of Art & Innovation at Access Space in Sheffield. He will be talking at the Festival about Refab Space, their d.i.y maker space, why they built it in 2011, and what they think now about the technologies.
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Michelle Williams
Dr Michelle Williams is Product Design Course leader at the University of Gloucestershire and founder of the Cheltenham Regeneration Repair Café. She will be talking about the creation of the Regeneration Repair Café and the importance of bringing repair culture to design education.
Janet Gunter
Janet Gunter is co-founder of The Restart Project, promoting community repair of electronics as a way to demanding better electronics. She is going to talk about what needs to change to dismantle the 50m ton e-waste mountain.
Watch Janet’s session