I’d like to have a list of repair businesses that we can give to people who bring something along we can’t repair, or to people who are comfortable with paying for repair - anyone got tips for building this up? I think I’ll have at least two categories - at the top of the list would be people who volunteer at my and neigbouring repair cafe events, and below them non-volunteering businesses - but are there any other suggestions?
Hi, Ian. Well, there’s Google, of course. Otherwise, do you have a local area page on Facebook that you could become a member of? We have several in my area and people are often asking for recommendations for all sorts of things. Businesses will then respond themselves, or other members will put companies forward. I expect there are similar strategies you could use on other social media platforms, it’s just that FB is the one I’m used to. Best, Sophie
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It’s a really good idea - it’s great to link up community repair and local repair businesses. We’ve mapped out repair businesses here in 11 boroughs in North and East London.
You can read more about the project here:
We had some criteria for whether to include a business in the list:
We have designed a set of criteria that we used to gauge the reliability of a repair business.
The criteria used are:
- The business has a trading address
- The business has 80% or more positive online reviews, with a minimum of 5 reviews.
- The business provides at least a one-month warranty on repairs.
In addition to this, we harness the expert knowledge of our community, and include businesses recommended directly by active Restarters.
cc @James_Diamond and @ugo as they worked on these criteria together.
Data on repair businesses is collected by researching them online, and by visiting the neighbourhoods in person to find additional businesses without a strong web presence.
@James_Diamond did all of the legwork (literally!) in finding the businesses - in addition to searching online as Sophie mentioned, a big part of it was cycling around the neighbourhood checking out businesses in person 
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I know @Club_de_Reparadores were also mapping businesses in their local area too - they might be able to share some tips!
Also @James_Diamond and @Club_de_Reparadores gave a presentation on this at the first Fixfest - you might find some useful tips in the notes from the session: https://pads.therestartproject.org/p/fixfest2017-mapping-commercial-repair
And the accompanying presentation:
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@neil I like the repair directory, how might I/we get it to be available for non-London? I’d much rather point people at a Restart Project asset (with all the benefits that has for promoting Restart) than host my own simple/primitive/manual directory.
Can this link up with move to OpenStreetMap as mapping source?
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We’d love for it to be used in other locations. We’re currently looking at the strategy to make that happen. We’ll have a chat here and keep you posted 
In terms of tech the backend is in place for recording the businesses, but I think we’d need to adopt a kind of Citymapper ‘choose your city’ approach for the front end part of the map.
Yes - would definitely like to switch this to OSM too.
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