Repair & Reuse Cafe

I’ve been involved with The Restart Project for several years now. Mainly following their work and sharing my repair experiences. In November, Tampere Hacklab had repair for a Teematorstai. And I’ve been hoping to see more communication and activities around repair at Hacklab.

I like The Restart Project because they are not looking to push their name onto organisations, but rather provide resources and information to help people repair things.

I’ve been working on a Suomi version of their repair kit documents. Here is the link to the working document:

Suomen Repair Kit

If you want to make suggestions, you can do so in the comments.

On their Restarters forum I’ve also been discussing The Great Migration: from Win10 to Linux that will likely happen due to the end of Win10 security updates in October.

And recently I made a “korjaa minut” (fix me) sign at Tampere Hacklab to encourage people to get involved in repairing and caring for our shared equipment and community.

I’m generally interested in all things repair and reuse, and am looking for opportunities to continue doing this kind of work.

Yes, more repair cafe stuff! In Jyväskylä, we have been hosting Repair Cafés since august, and it’s a lot of fun and the visitors seem to be very appreciative of the help. We’ve fixed electronics, toys, bikes, and other random things (even a huge bed – the guy lived upstairs from the lab and brought it down in the elevator). It’s a good avenue for recruiting members, too, as it gives people who are hacklab-curious a good opportunity to come check out the place (and fall in love with it, of course).

We are affiliated with repaircafe.org since I like uniting under a common banner and benefiting from shared brand recognition. We’ve met people who knew about Repair Café from France and recognised the concept. We also have a handful of volunteers who are just volunteers for the Repair Café, not hacklab members. I’ve recruited them through local facebook groups.

So far I feel it doesn’t take many visitors before all our volunteers are busy helping. A bigger repair project like a TV or a wrecked bike can occupy two volunteers for quite a while. So even if we have only like 5-10 visitors in one day, it feels really busy.

Using social media to recruit repairers and people who have things that need repairing is definitely the way to go. And I like the idea of having repair events as a way to introduce hacklab in a more welcoming and friendly way. Especially for people who are not accustomed to using tools, fixing things or diy. It gives visitors the opportunity to do something with hacklabers instead of just being shown around on the open hours.

How often do you have Repair Cafés in Jyväskylä Hacklab?

We have them once per month, every third saturday of the month. I can easily see it becoming popular enough to warrant a higher frequency, though.

That’s good to hear. Do you take photos and share the outcomes somewhere?

No, we haven’t done any of that so far. When we have the time we put some reports into repairmonitor, but it’s often too hectic to take the time for that. I’m running around doing ten things at the same time.

Only two repair cafés in the whole country.

https://dashboard.repairmonitor.org/?cafe=526&country=fi&year=all

What would it take for other hacklabs to participate?

Most of them probably haven’t thought of it or heard of it, so just talking about it with people from other hacklabs would be a good start!

I don’t think that’s enough. I’ve been mentioning it at Tampere Hacklab for 3+ years. Maybe what’s needed is a community repair at the next summit or a hacklab wide event during the next global repair day?

Right to Repair in the UK: where are we?

Event coming up on the 13.2.2025 to inform on the current situation of the Right to Repair.

https://ti.to/the-restart-project/right-to-repair-uk-webinar-2025