Welcome to the Restarters community!
Thank you for registering as a beta tester for the new Restarters Community platform!
This is a brand new space for anyone interested in community electronics repair events, whether as organisers, repairers or participants. It’s managed by The Restart Project as part of our work to promote community repair and fix our relationship with electronics.
It’s still very early days, but we aim to make this space a central point of contact and reference for everyone in our network instead of being split across a bunch of different channels and platforms.
The journey so far
For a while, we’ve been hearing from lots of people in the network that it’s too difficult to connect with each other; Restart Party hosts can’t find enough Restarters, people interested in getting involved can’t find others in their area, there’s nowhere accessible for everyone to share experiences and learn from each other and so on.And so, the idea for a central platform to connect everyone was born. For more about this, head over to our explanatory blog post .
After a lot of conversations with the community and a network-wide survey, we’ve opted to build this site - a Discourse-based online community platform. You can read about this process here.
The plan
Stage 1: Private beta [completed]
We reached out to those who’d expressed an interest in helping us shape this space and started sending out invites. Only those invited could access the forum.
Priorities at this stage were:
- testing software functionality (stuff like posting discussions, email notifications, mailing list mode [replying to discussions by email] and so on) + general bug squashing.
- trialling our proposed forum structure (do the categories we’ve set up work well for now?)
- starting to build up content (relevant discussions and resources)
- working out how to feature The Restart Party Kit
- thinking about how to incorporate spaces for non-English language discussions
- starting to co-create community guidelines and our moderation policy
- adjusting the look and feel of the site (we’ll be keeping it fairly basic, but we can make changes based on feedback)
Stage 2: Public beta [completed]
Anyone can register an account, but we’ll continue only spreading the word on an individual basis (not publicising it beyond our existing network).
Priorities at this stage are:
- opening up (read-only access of) selected categories to non-registered visitors (the internet at large)
- continuing to build up content (with a view to making this space a useful, practical resource for the whole community)
- developing the groups feature as an organisational tool for local community groups as well as guidelines for use
- refining the way The Restart Party Kit is featured
- further refining forum structure. As more people join, does the structure still work?
- trialling ideas for incorporating non-English language discussions
- finalising the first version of the community guidelines and our moderation policy
- getting feedback on member roles (how we manage rank/reputation etc.)
- bug squashing and minor tweaks to the look and feel of the site (again, keeping things basic)
Stage 3: Soft launch [completed]
The forum will be completely public - anyone can register without needing approval and it will be linked to from therestartproject.org. We’ll begin pushing it out to key people/groups not yet involved but avoid any wider-advertising.
Priorities at this stage are:
- implementing the groups feature and working with a small number of active groups to test & refine it
- some collective-thinking around how to implement a buddy system (being partnered with a more experienced community member to start being involved on the ground, e.g. running an event or learning repair skills. This is a function requested by many in the community)
- still more content creation, focused on providing practical tools and guidance around running electronics repair events (including a revamped ‘Restart Party Kit)
- further bug squashing and minor adjustments to look & feel
Stage 4: Active promotion ← We are here
We’ll start telling the rest of the world about the community platform and work to boost the number of members.
- implementing the buddy system and working a small number of active members to test & refine it
- drive activity levels and integrate new members
- refine onboarding process (are new people finding it as easy to get involved as they’d like?)
- stress-test the mechanisms put in place - how well does everything work with greater numbers (especially the buddy system)? Refine and adjust where necessary
Important
At the same time this space is getting started, we’ll also be making significant changes to the Fixometer, our data recording tool. In fact, we’ll be joining up the two platforms, hopefully making it easy to manage events, input data and connect with other people under one login.