FixFest 2017

Many of you will be familiar with London Restarter, who have had repair sessions in the space before. This weekend, they hosted the first international event for fixers. Attendees from Argentina, Tunisia, the USA, Canada, Norway (where it is illegal to repair your own appliances - really), Italy and the UK discussed policy, messaging, education and organisation. Keynote speakers included Kyle, founder of iFixit.com and leading researchers in the field. Several attendees were also members of Maker Spaces around the UK.

All this made me think about the oft-discussed issue of waste, and what we do with the outputs of our Space. Do we have a policy on repair vs. replacement? And what to do with equipment we don’t need any more? For example, the Maker Space Leicester rep had an interesting story about receiving donated equipment but then being stuck with an expensive and complicated disposal process due to internal components. A cautionary tale.

This is a thing?! Everyone has a snug, surely? More seriously this is an issue that we need to have some thoughts about going forwards, especially as we grow and fill out our container…

I really respect the work of the Restart Project , sadly I had a cold welcoming to their family when I tried to join them, I spent a couple of hours calibrating the laser of a first generation high end dvd player which wasn’t reading disks anymore, I was quite proud of it but apparently, that didn’t finish in the list of the “best repair of the day” because I was new…

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Sorry to hear that you had this experience Andrea. New fixers are usually welcomed warmly, but of course a lot depends on who is hosting that day and organising the event. I don’t think it is normal to single out any “best repair of the day” either; that is kind of counter to the ethos of repairing, but I don’t attend all of the events so maybe have not seen them.

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It was around 3 years ago, I think a lot of things were stabilizing back then , I guess…