Maintainers Spotlight | Submit a Blog Post
#MaintainersSpotlight
The Maintainers is a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world. Our members come from a variety of backgrounds, including engineers, business leaders, academic historians, social scientists, government, non-profit agencies, artists, activists, coders, and more.
In order to increase the visibility of maintenance efforts across all disciplines, we invite you to share your reflections and relationship to maintenance by submitting a blog post to spotlight a Maintainer or maintenance effort in your community. We encourage a range of media genres that can include written, audio, or visual work. If selected, your blog post will be featured as a part of our #MaintainersSpotlight blog post series.
Help us Spotlight Maintainers
Submit your blog post utilizing the form, linked here. Your pitch will include a headline, and you will be submitting your completed version of the blog post. If your work is not complete at this time, you will be encouraged to wait and re-submit once your piece is complete and ready for final edits. The Maintainers may have light touch edit recommendations for all submissions for cohesion of the series. If you have questions if your work is a good fit for our blog series, you can reach out with a summary of the theme and a sample of the work, and we will reply with pre-submission guidance.
Once you’ve pitched your blogpost, our Community Outreach & Events Coordinator will be in touch within two weeks of your submission. We will notify you if The Maintainers has accepted or denied your blog post for the #MaintainersSpotlight series. If accepted, final submission details will be communicated at that time.
Please note, we are unable to accept every pitch we receive, thank you for understanding!
Submit Here
Content Guidelines
The Maintainers is exploring what it means to communicate the work of a Maintainer or maintenance effort to a broad audience. Thus, we are not looking for highly technical papers and we wish to highlight a range of media genres. If you are submitting a written piece, ensure that it’s below 1500 words. We’re looking for spotlights of Maintainters or maintenance efforts that are:
Environmentally conscious approaches to maintenance and repair; On-the-ground accounts of repair shops or maintenance collectives; Showcases of redistribution of labor, care, and the social aspects of maintenance; Maintenance workers sharing their perspective and experience (caregivers, repair people, facilities workers, “essential” workers); Activists on infrastructure, repair, care, labor rights; Amplification of historically underrepresented voices in maintenance related fields and movements.
Our mission and values outline our approach to building a caring and well-maintained world, and serve to inform our activities as a network. Our Code of Engagement describes how we put our values into practice.
Lastly, we encourage your interpretation of the questions: Who or what do you maintain? Who or what maintains you?
Exchange
We thank you for your time and effort in submitting a blog post. If published, in exchange we will follow a promotional procedure to showcase your #MaintainersSpotlight. We will share your blog post to our network on all internal and external channels. We encourage you to promote your blog post widely as well! Your work will be highlighted:
- Website under the tag #MaintainersSpotlight: over 1,000 unique visitors.
- Sent out to our listserv: over 1,300 subscribers.
- Referenced in quarterly newsletter: over 1,500 subscribers.
- Promoted on Twitter: over 8,000 followers.
- Shared in celebration to those in your and our network directly relating to your work, and the Maintainer (organization or person) who was spotlighted: this publicity will be determined together.
Submit Here
If you have any questions, please reach out to our Community Outreach & Events Coordinator (liliana@themaintainers.org).