Looking for the maintainers who support long term change

A few years ago I went looking for maintainers. The people doing the vital work of looking after infrastructure, services, people and ideas. I now looking for them again!

While researching maintenance for a blog called ‘Care and maintenance is your most important work’, I found many interesting people working in this space and was keen to find out more. Somewhere along the way I never did properly connect to the community of people working on maintenance (to be fair, this was September 2020) but I’m ready now.

I was helped to find this motivation by the freelancer action learning set that I am lucky to be a part of. I was exploring an adjacent issue I was having and this is what popped out at the end. I love action learning sets!

The initial issue was about how I can support change in the world and not be the person pointing out why new idea x, y or z might fail. That can be helpful (as I’ve written recently!) but I don’t want to be just that. The grumpy naysayer.

I was able to recognise that what I want to do is help people think about the energy required to support care and maintenance. Find brilliant examples of this type of work and shine a light on it. Support people and organisations to put as much energy and resources into this as they do into innovation and new ideas so they can deliver long term sustainable change.

So I’m on the lookout for people and organisations to talk to over the summer. The lovely people at Maintain will be hearing from me soon (I hope that is ok!)

I’m also interested in how we decide what is and isn’t maintained. Maintenance is not about keeping the status quo — it has to be about maintaining what is good in the world and having the energy and effort required to ensure new ideas and ways of being can flourish.

Do you know any other people I should speak to? Are you a maintainer I could talk to? Please do get in touch.