The Maintainers draws together and supports communities that can create and nurture change, as well as promoting a maintenance mindset. We are buoyed by our community’s enthusiasm for this work, and love to hear about the impact The Maintainers has had on our network members and their work.
The Maintainers network has gathered in many ways, including through maintenance communities, co-creating guides and documents, at conferences, and on social media.
We currently connect with the Maintainers community through regular meet-ups, maintenance sessions, and one-on-one virtual coffee chats. The community is inclusive and self-identified: everyone has something to offer, and everyone is invited to participate. Here’s how you can get involved:
Our approach to building and maintaining communities of maintenance has evolved over time. Recently, we have taken decisive steps to incorporate, work with, amplify and bridge a community of global practitioners that lead initiatives focused on maintenance, repair and care in their locales. Our Narrative of Change lays out some of the thinking behind this recent work to update the ways we engage and connect communities.
Summary: The Maintainers network has transformed from an in-person conference series to a virtual space, convening practitioners and academics. This Narrative of Change blog post will be the first of two chapters. In this iteration, we articulate how our network … More →
From 2019 to 2021, Maintainers provided a group of maintenance communities with facilitation, project management, listservs, shared virtual workspaces and file repositories. Membership within these communities has been open to all willing to abide by their codes of practice. This work was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and in collaboration with the Educopia Institute. The communities are not currently active, but we invite you to review the projects, resources, and blog posts produced by these communities. Previous communities included Maintainers in the Workforce and Information Maintainers, whose work is featured below.
Our purpose is to support the maintenance of information and those who manage, maintain, and preserve information systems.
The Maintainers act on the conviction that our society often fails to maintain things and support the people involved in maintenance because this work is under-recognized, even ignored, until something breaks. We see communities as the best means to draw attention to maintenance and maintainers and create a more caring and well-maintained world because “communities” exist in the space between the embodied experiences of individual maintainers and the transformation of whole societies. The Maintenance Community Framework (MCF) is a record of how The Maintainers has learned from with and from: our research network, Maintenance Communities, and other collaborative groups that are applying maintenance thinking and action in their work.
