When & where?
12:15-13:00
Cinema room
Why you should come to this session
At Restart, we’ve been working hard to developing digital tools to bring people in our network together and connect all of our local stories as part of a wider narrative. In this interactive session, we’ll show you round the 3 online tools that make up restarters.net and talk about our vision for connecting the offline 
to the online 
and the local 
to the global 
.
Session outline
Part 1: How well do you know community repair? 
We started off with a quick quiz, drawing on the repair data collected by our network to give you an idea of the rich insights we can draw from recording data at events.
Part 2: A quick tour of restarters.net
Next, we took you on a brief tour of our community platform, touching on the three main areas, how they connect and why they can make your life easier as a community repair organiser or fixer:
- The Fixometer (for organising events and recording repair data) - you can find more information about the Fixometer on our main site.
- Talk (this space, used to co-ordinate and share experiences with the rest of the community)
- Restarters Wiki (a resource for pooling our collective repair expertise)
Part 3: Hands on session
For the rest of the session and over lunch, we asked you to sign up and challenged you to completed the following:
- Find the ‘Meet and greet’ conversation in the discussion area and introduce yourself.
- Find a interesting discussion and get involved.
- Join a group near you, add your own group &/or RSVP to an event in the Fixometer
- Let us know is there’s anything else you’d like this platform to do in the Restarters.net Development category in the discussion area.
Questions
A number of you had great questions about the platform:
- @catherine_causley asked whether we’re actually under-reporting our impact as we don’t currently have a way of tracking repairs completed after events by participants. Catherine also offered some advice for groups working with local authorities, saying that while some councils measure impact in weight of waste saved, the amount of CO2 diverted is a much more useful metric for electronics/electrical repair.
- @Divya_Pujara shared that his group records PAT testing for each item before and after a repair is attempted and wondered whether adding fields for PAT testing to the Fixometer would be useful
- @Margaret_Hersee raised a great point about the lifespan of items after being repaired. We currently make the assumption that by repairing a device we extend its life by half of the average lifespan for that category of devices. We could investigate this with longitudinal studies that follow up with participants after having a device repaired.
About the facilitators
@neil is The Restart Project’s tech lead and the primary architect behind restarters.net. Neil understands the platform better than anyone as well as its role in measuring the impact of community repair.
@james is The Restart Project’s online community lead and is responsible for supporting groups in the Restart network outside of London. He has a background in online community management and is a big believer in the power of digital tools to complement and strengthen offline activity.
Help us document this session!
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. Feel free to make edits and add your own notes
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- what happened in the session?
- what did you learn or find interesting?
- who did you talk to and did any actions come out of the conversation?
