What do you want from this site?

Help & feedback
1

We want this place to be as useful and interesting as possible for you. We’ve already talked to a lot of you and gathered lots of input from our community survey. Through that process, we were reminded that this community is a diverse group of people with different skills, interests and priorities. It’s clear there’s a lot we share too.

Based on your feedback so far, our priorities for this space are:

  1. connect people who have skills and experience with those who need a little extra support
  2. make it easier to find other people in your local area
  3. make sure this site fits in with everyone’s online habits
Click/tap to see a summary of the survey results

The vast majority of you who answered the survey reported wanting more and better. Restarters and participants want more parties more regularly. Hosts want better ways of finding Restarters and more help with event planning. Affiliated groups and those not yet involved also want it to be easier finding local help.

Getting help from people already involved and those in your area was a very common theme and were the top rated suggested functions of the new platform on average. This also tallies with feedback we’ve received separately from groups in London and beyond.

Overall then, it looks like this should be the initial focus of the new platform. How can we connect people who have skills and experience with those who need a little extra support? How can we make it easier to find other people in your local area? And how can we make sure the new space fits in with everyone’s online habits?

See the full write-up here.

These are the overall aims and we’re keen to hear how you think we can make them happen. But we’d also love to hear about what else you’d like to see.

What would make this forum worth using for you?

2

I’m most keen to unleash more peer-to-peer support, both online and offline. Over the years many people have contacted us for help, we’ve sent advice, but it would have been amazing to simply pair people seeking help with experienced people.

And of course, I’m really interested in some of the sharing of best practices, grassroots innovations (some of which we saw/heard at Fixfest) and growing community repair to reach more people and more kinds of people.

3

As well as the peer-to-peer advice, I want it to inspire and to reinforce why we do what we do.

I want to hear, from around the world, stories about the importance of repair. And the fun!

So positive stories like how a group fixed a little girl’s Nintendo DS and she can play games again, or we put Linux on an old laptop for a community centre and now they can access resources again.

Techy stories about a really challenging problem that someone solved and the hacks they had to use to do it.

Also the negative and the political, the bigger picture stuff of social and environmental impact - stories about the rise of e-waste, the problems with the world’s appetite for electronics, labour rights, etc.