Last month, ECOS released their report, Long Live The Machine, on the reasons why laptops fail and the barriers to their repair. The report details a number of great policy recommendations that could help overcome these obstacles and enable longer laptop lifetimes.
It’s a great report, and one aspect in particular we wanted to mention here is the inclusion of repair data from community repair events. The report includes an analysis we did of the reasons for failures of laptops brought to community repair events, as well as the associated success rates for the repair of different faults. It’s exciting to see community repair data making its way upstream to policy discussion.
This builds on the work going all the way back to Open Data Day 2019, Fixfest 2019, and everyone’s crowdsourced contributions to FaultCat 
over the last few months. And of course, none of this would be possible at all without all the groups around the world collecting and uploading data in the first place - thanks to everyone involved, it’s a real community effort 
We also participated in a webinar discussing the report, which you can find online:
Finally, although we might not be fixing together in person as much at present, if you’re still keen to find ways to contribute to the network’s data, there’s plenty of ways to stay active. We can get existing data into the system (maybe you’ve got a stack of past paper logs of repair data, or you’ve got a spreadsheet of your group’s historic repair data?) - and we can work together at cleaning up old data with the online activities of MiscCat and FaultCat. (And find other ideas to stay active here!)