Welcome to Restarters! This is a community for anyone interested in community repair events (Restart Parties, Repair Cafés and so on), the Right to Repair, or fixing things in general.
Click on the link below that best describes how you’d like to be involved:
I (want to) organise repair events
Organising a successful repair event is incredibly rewarding and easier than you might think, especially with the Restarters community supporting you all the way! Here’s how Restarters.net can help make planning your events easier:
Set up your own space by creating a group and customise it with your own logo, links and description. Your group will become your organising hub. Once fully set up, it can take out some of the admin that comes with managing a team of people.
Plus, you’ll automatically get your own visitor-friendly page on our main site (like this one for Reading Repair Café).
Need repair tools? If you’re a new group and need a hand stocking up with some tools, we can provide a starter bundle containing an iFixt Pro Tech Toolkit worth £60 for just the price of shipping. Click/tap here for more info.
If you’d like to use the site to communicate with your volunteers, you can invite fellow organisers, repairers and others to join the group.
You can do this via email from your group’s page (under the ‘Group actions’ menu in the top right). A window will pop up where you can write an email inviting people to the group (or event). Feel free to customise your email to suit whomever you’re inviting:
If you’d prefer to use a link, click on ‘Invite via shareable link’ in the top right. You can then copy the link and share it with anyone you want to invite.
You can also find new repairers and organisers in your area by inviting other members of the platform who are based nearby. This can be especially useful if your group is just getting started.
On your group’s page, click the ‘Volunteers nearby’ button in the ‘Group actions’ menu. Then click on ‘Volunteers nearby’:
You’ll then see a list of people who are based in your area. Click on the invite link underneath the name of anyone you’d like to invite to follow your group.
Inviting other people can make your life easier in a number of ways:
Keep volunteers up to date automatically: members of your group will receive email notifications whenever you add an event (if they haven’t opted out).
Stay organised: you’ll have a list of everyone who’s involved, who you can contact through Talk (i.e. this forum).
See who’s coming to your next event: volunteers can RSVP to events you create, letting you know they’ll be there at the click of a button.
Know what skills you’ll have in the room: if your volunteers have added skills to their profile, you’ll also see those, so you’ll know in advance what kinds of repair you can handle.
Restarters Talk (this forum) lets you send messages to your group members individually—or to everyone all at once—without having to store their email address. So when it comes to GDPR, you’re covered! This works a bit like a mailing list and gives you a place to co-ordinate while keeping a neat record of conversations. It also integrates fully with email, so your group members don’t have to log in to read or reply. Learn how to communicate with your group here.
And for more information on how to use this forum, see here,
Restarters Talk is also a great place to meet the rest of the network: ask fellow organisers for advice, share learning and connect with others passionate about community repair events.
Add events to your group to let the world know your plans - don’t forget to read our event-planning guide for help. Once approved, your event will automatically get published on the Restart website (like this one) and appear in our monthly newsletter to help spread the word.
For a more personal touch and to confirm attendance, invite people via email straight from the event’s page.
Quantify how awesome you and your repairers are by adding repair data during or after your events. The tool will automatically measure your environmental impact for all items brought along, letting you and your volunteers know how much CO2e and waste you’ve diverted. As you run more events, your group page will keep a track of your total stats too.
If you already record repair data on the Repair Café Foundation’s Repair Monitor, please continue to use only this. We collate data from both tools for the Open Repair Alliance so it’s important to use just one tool to avoid double counting any repairs.
Saving waste and CO2e is definitely worth shouting about, so you can also share your stats with anyone, such as your community or funders. 
New: automatically generated, beautiful infographics you can share on social media! Learn more here.
As you collect more data, you’ll be able to analyse the types of item you see at events (e.g. which devices are most common, have the highest fix rates and so on).
There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of fixing something that was broken — especially at a community repair event! But it can be equally frustrating when a repair proves too difficult or even impossible due to lack of decent documentation, unavailable spare parts or repair-unfriendly design.
Restarters.net is our answer to this. It’s a place to share problems, solutions and skills with other repairers as well as record the repairs you make to help us campaign for more repairable products.
We are a community of repairers with literally centuries of experience between us! If you have trouble with a particular device, chances are there’s someone on the forum—Talk—who’s come across something similar and would be happy to help out. This is also where we share Repair stories : successes , questions 
, and oddities 
But more than talking about specific devices, we’re interested in sharing transferable repair skills, which we document on our collaborative repair wiki. This is a great resource for anyone getting started with electronics repair as well as those with more experience.
The Wiki is written and owned by the community and any member is welcome to contribute.
It’s easy to keep up to date with repair events happening in your area. Simply find and follow your local repair group(s) to receive a notification whenever they plan a new event (assuming you’ve opted into emails).
You can also add events to your personal calendar (Google, Outlook, iCal or Yahoo). This is particularly useful if you don’t log in very often but want to remember when events are happening.
Go the the page for the group whose events you want to follow and click on the calendar button above the list of their events:
Copy the URL that pops up:
In your personal calendar app or website, there should be an option to subscribe to a public calendar. You may need to consult the help page for your calendar app or site. Once you’ve found the option, paste the URL and confirm. Your group’s repair events should now get added to your calendar automatically.
Note: this will keep your calendar updated with any new events your group adds until you unsubscribe.
To help out the organisers, you can also let them know you’re coming by clicking on the RSVP button on the event’s page. Knowing who plans to be there can remove a whole lot of stress for whoever is planning the event.
Your local group has the option to use Talk (this forum) to send out messages. So keep an eye on your inbox to stay in the loop.
Every repair you make not only reduces waste and greenhouse gas emissions, but can also help us learn more about why devices fail and what makes repairing them difficult.
We can all probably list common issues with various products (like failing elements in a toaster and smashed screens on phones) as well as lots factors that make repair more complicated (such as the use of glue not screws, unavailability of spare parts and so on). But wouldn’t it be useful to quantify these?
For every event, we record as much data as we can about each repair. So far, we’ve logged well over 20,000 repair attempts together and are using this data to help us campaign for the Right to Repair.
We can also use this data to learn more about what goes wrong with our devices, such as why computers break.
It’s easy to record your repairs yourself, and by doing so, you might just be helping shape the products of the future!
Note: it is possible to record non-electrical items! More info here.
If there’s nothing happening in your local area yet or you’d prefer to get involved online, there are a number of ways to help the network promote repair.
We’ve recorded data on over 16,000 repair attempts made at events across the network. We’re trying to use all this data to work out the positive environmental impact we’re having as well as find out why devices break, how they can be fixed and identify systemic barriers to repair.
to see an example of this in action.
Help us make sense of the repair data we collect.
The easiest way to help us understand our repair data is by starting a quest on our data workbench. Quests are super simple, quick ways to investigate a particular question we have about why our products break. Even 1 minute is enough time to contribute something meaningful!
If you’d like to dive in deeper, we’re always looking for people to help with the following areas:
If you’re interested in helping out, send a message to @Monique, who is co-ordinating this activity.
And be sure to check this topic for a list of current ways to get involved:
Together, we’re building up a knowledge bank of useful repair information on our Repair Wiki. It’s a place where those of us in the Restart community with experience and skills in mending appliances and gadgets can share them with those who are starting out, or whose own knowledge lies in different areas.
Being a wiki, anyone with an account on Restarters․net is welcome to contribute, by adding to the pages that already exist or by writing new pages that are missing.
If you’re a skilled electronics/electrical repairer and would like to share your expertise with the community, just send a message to @philip who is co-ordinating activity on the Wiki.
As well as individual community repair groups, we work with repair networks - groups or organisations that help support other groups across a specific region or country.
We want Restarters․net to provide all the tools that network co-ordinators need to manage and stay up to date with all their groups.
Having already partnered with a few different networks in the UK, Belgium and France who now use Restarters to allow volunteers to add new events, display these events on external sites, record repair data and more, we’ve developed many of these features already.
Allow organisers in your network to add and maintain their own events and informationGroup organisers get their own space to share and update public information about their group. They can also add (and edit) events at any time. And by recording repair data from events, they can view their environmental impact, which gets added to the network’s impact stats too.
Communicate with organisers in your networkRestarters Talk (this forum) is a powerful communication tool. Everyone who registers on Restarters․net can get an account here. Talk allows you to communicate in a number of ways:
Personalise your network’s experienceWhile the Restarters brand was designed for everyone involved in community repair, you may prefer your groups to see your own network’s branding, something they recognise.
Use your logo. It’s now possible to use your own logo on Restarters․net for groups in your network. This can help the site feel more familiar and reassure people that they are in the right place.
Choose your language. You can also set the default language to anything you like to make it as easy to use as possible for your network.
Customise your URL. To achieve all these personalisations, we can set up a unique subdomain for your network allowing you to access the platform at: yourname․restarters․net
Want an example? Have a look at Repair Together’s version to see what this all looks like.
Display your groups’ data on your own websiteIf your network has its own website, you may want to use it to let visitors know when and where your groups’ events are happening. As long as your groups are adding their events to Restarters․net, our API will allow you to show your groups and their events on your site automatically. This will save you from having to upload them all manually.
Want an example? Repair Together is a network of 170+ Repair Cafés across Brussels and Wallonia in Belgium. All their groups and events are managed right here on Restarters․net and their main website pulls this information across to display it automatically. We do something similar on the Restart website.
Access event and repair data from all your groupsIf your network uses Restarters․net, we can create a custom analytics dashboard for you, containing analysis and data-vis about events, hours volunteered, environmental impact, items repaired and number of visitors from all your groups.
If you’d like to learn more, contact community@therestartproject.org
