Dr Laura James's writings

The  Public Stack Summit  took place on a boat. This was a great idea — not only were we all there the whole day, there wasn’t any wifi and once we were out in the bay there wasn’t really any mobile internet either. So everyone paid attention. Public Stacks Boat We started out by talking about what we hoped a public stack might be. That meant discussing both ‘public’ and ‘stack’, but was oddly useful.  Waag  and  Decode  had convened a really diverse group, which managed to include an incredible range of tech builders at (almost all?) stack levels, as well as both purists and pragmatists. Because everyone was deeply into this space, we didn’t need to set the scene or even describe the problem. I have far too rarely been in a room with people able to knowledgeably discuss internet energy consumption, RISC V, the challenges of consumer electronics manufacturing, the dominance of Cisco/Juniper/Huawei in switchgear, issues around accessibility, inclusion and design in free softw

The  Festival of Maintenance  will be on Saturday 22nd September, 2018, in London.  It’s exciting to see a community of volunteers come together around this, and to realise how many ideas and aspects of maintenance we should be talking more about. (If you can help with marketing, sponsorship, inviting speakers, or advance logistics, get in touch :) We’re not short of ideas, but more helping hands will make the day even better!) The Festival of Maintenance will be a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, recognising the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. Maintainers can be found in many contexts, including nature, software, infrastructure, communities, industry, information, arts and heritage. The Festival will bring together traditional disciplines of maintenance, repair and stewardship, with new forms such as supporting digital products, sustaining open source so