Announcing Fixfest 2025!

Events
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Originally published at: Announcing Fixfest 2025! - The Restart Project

We are absolutely thrilled to announce the return of Fixfest, which will take place in London (UK) from 5-6 September, 2025.

Fixfest is a global gathering of repairers and tinkerers, activists, policy-makers, thinkers, educators and companies from all over the world. We come together every few years.

Organised by The Restart Project, Fixfest 2025 promises to be a unique chance to meet and learn from people involved in every aspect of community repair and those pushing for making repair available to all across the globe. We’re excited to share the first two confirmed sponsors of Fixfest 2025: iFixit and Softwire. We’ll announce additional sponsors as they are finalised.

What topics will Fixfest 2025 cover?

We’ve come a long way since the very first Fixfest back in 2017. At the time, community repair groups were few and generally understood as a nice hobby. Most attendees heard the term Right to Repair there for the first time. Today there are thousands of repair cafés around the world, the repair movement has strong demands for policymakers at both national and global levels, and plenty of companies are trying to build a new repair and reuse economy.

Yet, there’s plenty still to address: from the slow progress in pro-repair legislation to the ever-rising tide of throwaway products coming to market, from software obsolescence to marketing campaigns asking us to recycle and upgrade rather than to repair and slow down production and consumption of new products.

As we bring the community together once again, we’ll focus on three key themes:

  1. Building repair solutions on the ground: how do we make a range of community-based repair options available for local people? How do we grow our collective impact as repair groups and strengthen our networks? What’s working and what are the challenges?
  2. Making the business case for repair: what role can independent repair businesses play and how can we support their development? How do we build an economy that works for people and the planet, creating repair jobs and reducing unnecessary waste?
  3. Fixing the system: what progress is being made towards the Right to Repair at a policy level, what are the challenges and how can we overcome them? How do we tackle overproduction? How do we make repair affordable? How do we prioritise reuse over recycling?

How to get involved

Fixfest will include panels, presentations, hands-on sessions and talks. It’s designed around topics and expertise shared by all participants, so if you’d like to be involved we recommend submitting a session proposal or suggestion for a topic you’d like to be covered in the programme.

Ultimately Fixfest is about bringing together an incredibly inspiring group of people making a difference in their own communities in every corner of the world. So we’ll have plenty of opportunities for participants to mingle and get to know each other, spark spontaneous conversations and come up with new collaborations to take the repair movement to the next level.

Propose a session for Fixfest 2025

We will publish more details about Fixfest 2025 and start releasing tickets soon!

Be among the first to hear about tickets by signing up for email updates here:

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Happy Dance!

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Hello - Tooting Restart has had a session scheduled on Sat 6 September since the beginning of the year, and clearly this event is going to seriously affect it - perhaps even make it impossible.

However noone has been in touch to tell us about the clash.

How does Restart central propose that groups that have sessions scheduled should respond?

It’d be great to be able to chat with someone about this.

Paula

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Repair Cafe Lambeth’s regular monthly event is also on that Saturday.

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Hi Paula,

Thank you so much for getting in touch regarding this and our apologies for the unfortunate coincidence- we completely understand your concerns.

I’m emailing all London Group Leads tomorrow and will include a reminder for the Fixfest dates.

With events happening every weekend, occasional overlaps are unfortunately hard to avoid. That said, we want to re-assure you that we expect no more than 2 people from each local group to attend Fixfest. There will be a Restart Party as part of Fixfest, which we hope will be supported by some of our international participants & volunteers. Therefore, it hopefully won’t affect the pool of volunteers available for your event.

I’ll be in touch separately via email to check in and offer my support, or to arrange a further chat if helpful.

Thanks again for flagging this.

Best wishes,

Josie

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Thank you Josie for getting in touch. That’s helpful to know. Hopefully we can still continue on Sat 6 Sept as planned.

Paula

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Really excited about attending FixFest in September. I haven’t been able to get my ticket yet. Hope to get one when more are released. Also I suggested an idea for a session via email. Not sure if you got that?

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Hey Edwina! We did get your proposal, yep :slight_smile:
We’re working through all the submissions at the moment (we’ve been lucky to have quite a few of them!)
Are you hoping to get a ticket for Friday only? I’ll drop you an email about your session, but it’s looking more likely that we’ll have space for it on the Saturday.

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Sorry but I’m not going to make it this time :frowning:

Please donate my ticket to someone else who needs it.

Hope it goes swimmingly.

Dave.

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Sorry to hear it Dave! Hope everything is ok!
We’ll try to offer your spot to someone on the waiting list.

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Yes thanks James: I’m OK but getting older and busier :old_man::construction_worker_man:

One thing I did notice which shocked me was the Saturday repair event “offering free electrical & textile repairs” with no mention of participation or learning :frowning:

What’s going on? Apart from being contrary to the Restart philosophy, this also undermines the local repair economy.

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Hi Dave, we really missed you at Fixfest :frowning: - it was such a buzzing weekend, with many old friends and many new participants join the range of activities, talks, participatory sessions, and much more - you would have loved it.

I wanted to reassure you about the repair event that took place at the Fixing Factory - it was organised in partnership with Hackney Council and featured two other local organisations (Kundakala and Dr. Bike) - both of these were offering repair services at the event, not learning opportunities. While Fixing Factory volunteers were offering the usual joint repair activities to learn new skills.

The point of the day was to inform and inspire local residents in Hackney about the Fixing Factory and promote the range of learning opportunities we offer, so all in tune with our philosophy and strategy. Some people might have come for a free bike servicing, but will hopefully have been inspired to make more use of what we offer.

We also ran a repair walk with participants, which visited a local repair business involved in the trial of the repair voucher scheme. And we hosted a session on how community repair groups and repair businesses can support each other further. More documentation and videos for some of the sessions to follow soon!