The Information Maintainers is an open community dedicated to supporting the maintenance of information and those who manage, maintain, and preserve information systems. On September 25, we held our monthly meeting where we eschewed our usual guest-speaker structure to spend some time learning about information maintenance frameworks for Indigenous data sovereignty and the preservation of Indigenous cultural knowledge.
In the last few years, both popular and academic outlets have been paying renewed attention to the relationship between technology and work. Often framed through the so-called “future of work,” questions focus on how technological change shapes organizational change and whether new technologies will lead to unemployment and depressed wages.
Through an alternative set of measurements to quantify the cost of a basic household budget, the ALICE team is able to demonstrate how many households are currently Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed – which happens to be a staggering proportion of people in the United States.
The Information Maintainers is an open community dedicated to supporting the maintenance of information and those who manage, maintain, and preserve information systems. On August 21, 2020, we spent our monthly meeting exploring the intersection of digital preservation and open-source software. Our speaker was digital preservation domain expert, and full-stack developer, Ross Spencer.
This virtual discussion focuses on social care and what maintainers can learn from more formal care relationships. We explored various dimensions of social care – such as paid and unpaid assistance for children, adults, and the elderly.
This discussion covered the concept of “gig economy” and maintenance. Gig workers (shoppers, drivers, etc) sustain daily life, and as such have been recognized as “essential workers.” But this dependence on gig workers raises an important question: what steps do companies, governments, and individuals take to maintain gig workers – or, in other words, to ensure that this form of labor is sustainable? This discussion featured two experts on gig economies in the United States and Europe.