Fixfest UK: a month of online exchange and learning

Update 31 July: We’ve published the playlist of Fixfest session videos here.

On Thursday, we wrapped up the second edition of Fixfest UK, the first online edition! Thank you to the 300+ people who “attended” Fixfest UK over the past month.

The last session was about our repair data, featuring Stuart Ward of Reading Repair Cafe. Speakers showed how repair data is useful at a local, regional, national and international scale.

Recording what we discussed, and highlights

Not everybody could make every session, and there was definitely demand for recordings of the sessions. We’ll have recordings ready to share by the end of the month, and we will post on our YouTube channel and our forum on Restarters.net. [Update: we’ve published the sessions here.]

We had 11 sessions total. Listen here to the Keynote by Josh Babarinde of Cracked It, London social enterprise teaching at-risk youth how to fix mobiles.

Other highlights

Chris (Cambridgeshire Repair Cafes) demo of his component tester – to the delight of many assembled fixers.
John (Repair Cafe Wales) and Clare (Repair Cafe Portsmouth) highly participatory session on adult learning – we all got involved.
The highly competitive Glasgow Quiz by Repair Cafe Glasgow, where we learned that the Govan Hogbacks were NOT a heavy metal band from Glasgow
Jennie (Cheeky Handmades) sewing machine “Ask Me Anything” – such great energy and wisdom!
Our Ugo telling the Commons Environmental Audit Committee that industry will fight regulation “tooth and nail”
Felipe Fonseca (University of Dundee) and his takedown of the corporate “smart city” agenda
Lightning Talks Compere Dave Green’s amazing microphone!
Tony Brown’s top tips for trash-picking TVs
Chris and Lee’s story about the first piece of toast ever made at Repair Cafe Belfast
Monique (Restart) tour of Dutch and German repair data – such complexity and precision

What participants said

I’ll be sharing insights learned, tips, stories etc with the rest of our repair cafe team

…the overview of the issues and the range of topics covered was really good. Having it online was a bonus as it turned out…

Wide variety of subjects and people of all different backgrounds

[I] liked being part of fixing community.

Please give back to the community

Here are three things you can do to give back to the community and help promote our cause of better, more repairable products!

Please take a couple of minutes to send us your feedback to make future Fixfests even better. We recognise there were some technical difficulties with our platform, and we’d like to hear what we can do better.
Help out with our new online data project, MobiFix 🐳 you can spare 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. You can do this while on hold to your utility company, or waiting for something.
We’re launching a drive to get missing data in the Fixometer! 1/3 repair events in the year prior to March are missing data. Please get in touch if we can help you enter some of the missing data. This data will help us push for more repairable products.