 I had originally suggested we do some kind of talk or panel with involving everyone and sharing experiences, but it's kind of difficult on a stage like this, so I'm just going to present my slides, which I had prepared anyway, and I'll invite you all to our village afterwards for a discussion, whoever wants to talk about details of certain repairs or exchanging any ideas for repair coffees and stuff like that. Also, during the talk, if you've got any questions, please interrupt me at the spot and ask and I'll try to clarify. So welcome to Repair for Future, I'm Andreas or Fraxinus or RepairFox, I'm an electrical engineer from Germany, I'm developing software in my day job and I founded a repair cafe in the hometown of Schaffenburg of mine. I'm a member of a makerspace, Schaffenburg EV, there's also a company called Schaffenburg in the Netherlands and they make office furniture, but we're not affiliated. Also we're not sponsored, sadly. I'm giving tips and a live TV show in Germany's RAD, every once in a while, and I founded another repair cafe in my home village just a few months ago. So somebody once said, in a way, everybody is a hacker, everyone has their tricks to deal with technology in everyday life. And that person was Paul Holland, it's German. Yeah, so what he basically says, it is hacking to deal with technology and problems in your everyday life. So everybody has heard the word life hack, that's pretty much the gist of it I think. And that's why I do these talks at hacker conferences and camps like this, because I think there's just such a closeness in mindsets that we should really work together. Like this. Yeah, let's see, there's another slide. And of course, I brought some motivation, this is a photo from today. My friend woke up this morning laying on the ground because his air bad was leaking and all the air leaked out, so we had to fix it. Of course I had patches and PVC glue, and we could repair it. Yesterday, our crepe maker in the village broke. The switch broke. It is a spare part that would cost like two euros or 50 cents, but the regular consumer would have to throw the thing away, it's out of warranty. It has special screws that you can't open without a special tool set. What should you do? Usually it would be throwing it away. We just shorted the switch and we can use it again. So who hasn't heard what a repair cafe is? Okay, I will explain. So a repair cafe is a kind of meeting where volunteers like me go and help people seeking help trying to repair something and can do it themselves and show them to help themselves. So it is a kind of repairing together socially and it is of course meant for helping people who may be unable to afford replacing or something. And of course it's also there to stop people from just throwing it away if it's easy to repair and replacing it with a new bought item. To save resources and keep it out of landfill. And just some 40, 50 kilometers west from here in Amsterdam was the first organized repair cafe in 2009 where she pretty much formalized this as an event. So people have always helped each other in neighborhoods and helped each other repair stuff. But the way our society works today is that people aren't so close with their neighborhoods anymore and stuff like that. So it wasn't easy finding somebody who's not a professional to repair things. And even for professional repairs it's hard. Usually people get told no we can fix that toaster that doesn't make any sense. The time it takes us to open it is more than a new toaster would cost. So what we do at a repair cafe is a lot of times is tending to those products that aren't really worth much anymore anyway and people would just throw them out without really thinking much about it. Of course sometimes it's a flat TV that is just out of warranty and maybe costs a thousand euros and it's just a tiny little diode for 50 cents that blew. We've seen that before too. So anyway it was Martin Postma from Amsterdam who formalized this and founded the Stichting Repair Cafe in 2010 and they have this starter set which works kind of like a franchise with a squiggly logo which has changed by now. It's not quite a squiggly anymore. Not much prettier either though and it's very successful. So there are hundreds of repair cafes around the world if not thousands. Hundreds in Germany alone and big cities have multiple ones. Some work all days of the week it's become a real movement. So there are other, how should I call it, it's not really organizations, more like a collective organization. So in Germany has the Netzwerk Reparatur Initiativen, actually all German speaking countries, Austria, Switzerland too. And there are 950 members listed out of which they probably aren't all active anymore. Maybe some of them were a one-time thing or so but it's a couple of hundred and it's really amazing and the United Kingdom has the restart project which is London based and they are really professionalizing. They even have fixed factories now, what they call it, where people can go with their devices and they really have professionals that do this as a full-time job. Like you would expect or would have expected back in the good days from your TV sales person next door and of course internationally and strongly in the United States there is iFixit founded by Kyle Wiens and they have a big online community with many repair manuals and they're also strongly lobbying for the right to repair movement in the United States. And of course there's also iFixit in the European Union based in Germany. So how does typical day at a repair event look like? This is our logo from Schaffenburg. We tried incorporating all the different things that we do like sewing and electronics, woodwork, bicycles, mechanical stuff, whatnot into them and the motto is we can fix it together pretty much. So we have these little slips of paper that people write their names in and what they brought. So a toaster and what the defect is, it doesn't heat anymore or it doesn't stay down. We try to ask them at the entrance what the exact problem is because otherwise people will just write it doesn't work. And it helps the repair people if they have a slight idea of what's going on. And of course on the other side there's the house rules which boiled down to say if it breaks for good while trying to fix it then it's bad luck, things like that. And then our repair helpers take the slips of paper off of the blackboard and then ask the people to come to their desk and then they start fixing it together. The repair helpers bring their own toolboxes, the stuff that they're used to, what they can work with well, like their own multimeters and whatever screwdrivers or not soldering irons, sewing machines, glue, stuff like that. And then usually there's food, like the name repair café already implies. Of course by the way there aren't all called repair café, the Stichting repair café expects them to be named repair café but you could just as well call it repair initiative or café kaputt or something like that. There are so many creative names for them. We start with coffee and cake as well and sometimes we also cook. It depends on where we do our event. We always change locations after each event and sometimes the people there prepare, like in this case it is some Turkish food. We've usually got some bicycle repairs going on and fixing clothes or dolls or toys all different things. People bring the funniest stuff. Last time somebody brought a pool cleaning robot, something that crawls over a floor of a pool. And then we all have set up our little tables with, like here really is fixing some blender or I don't know what and there's somebody fixing something else and yeah people sit together with the repair helper and they watch and if they can they'll hold something or unscrew it themselves and sometimes people will even do it all by themselves that they just need a little hint every once in a while. This is the city major at the first event and that is me eight years ago or something fixing the kitchen machine of his wife. Okay and yeah sometimes like CD players or hi-fi devices, especially like tube devices are really time consuming to repair and have to be a lot of measurements done and we need a lot of spare parts and then that goes out of scope and time range of what we can do in a repair cafe. And then sometimes people like take them home privately and continue it there in officially. Yeah so maybe you remember luckily it's all over now but there was a pandemic and it kind of hit the repair cafes as well. There was a lockdown in Germany I think here in the Netherlands as well at some point and we couldn't do anything anymore. We were very unprepared for it and so many appointments were just cancelled but for example Repair Cafe Aschaffenburg started already a month or something into the pandemic into experimenting with remote services. So we would offer a jitzy instance where people could lock in during the time that was scheduled for Repair Cafe. We always do that once a month at a Saturday and we had leaflets printed. So the appointments were already known and instead of just cancelling them all together instead we did it online on our jitzy instance. I'll show a little bit in the next slide how that could work. And then after the lockdown we did the events offline with additional hygiene measures like disinfection and social distancing and a limited amount of guests that had to pre-book. This is just a list of different Repair Cafes doing online events just like we did and something that is noteworthy especially at these kind of conferences is that most of them used open solutions for the video conferencing like a lot of them used big blue button or jitzy and just a few of them used proprietary stuff like Zoom or Microsoft Teams. Some of them were even provided by Makerspaces. Yeah so how can online repairing work? This was during our first online repair session and there's a guest and she was trying to fix the video projector and we helped her disassemble the case which is always very hard even if you have it on your table in front of you and if you have to if you have to remotely tell a layman or a lay person how to open something like that up then it's really difficult. You can see it's an electronic device so it has mains voltage in it of course we unplugged it all and it was basically just diagnostics but we could tell that this one power regulator had blown and she was even able like you can you can see here is a part of it. After like trying to get it open for an hour and a half or something she saw that this part had blown and we were able to order the spare part and then during a later time when she came into the repair cafe we could solder it and switch it and repair it that way. This would have been usually something where a person would have to come to the repair cafe twice because of course we can't have all special parts on stock. Yeah with a video resolution especially with WebRTC the inscriptions on the parts are of course not readable so some of the repair initiatives they started using out-of-band high-res photography for those kind of diagnostics instead but what is cool is that you can open a repair manual and then show her where the clips are and things like that or if a person has a computer problems you can help them like with a team viewer or something. Yeah then after these experiments of the separate initiatives there was a bundled approach by the network Reparatur Initiative for basically all of Germany were helpers from the different initiatives could log in and then help guests and that was a week in February 2021 where we did that for every every evening and afterwards we did it once per month and in the beginning we had quite some guests like in March there were 40 guests and over 20 helpers and 10 repairs all together some people just wanted to to check in and see how it could work but that steadily went down the hill so in the end there were only repairs but no guests trying to get anything fixed so we turned it into more something like a monthly meet-up of the repair community because this network repair initiatives also did like meet-ups in the different regions of Germany and like a federal for the whole country once a year and that couldn't take place either which was very sad because repairs really need to repair like I know it for myself if we can't repair something then we get yeah so we we were always waiting for guests I would could have good so why do we even have to do this the problem is that in Europe alone this is a number from two years ago I think or last year when when was that with that giant ship being stuck in the in that canal it was last year yeah so imagine 60 of those giant things filled all the way with waste with electric waste is is what Europe alone produces every year this is it's unimaginable it's 20 kilos per person per year and we want to basically be an impulse and and give give people yeah a way of changing their their thinking and the way they consume especially electronics but also clothes and textiles and we're trying to kind of kick off a political process too so there is already the European equity design directive which for example has brought us leds as light bulb replacements or vacuum cleaners that have a limited wattage stuff like that so some of those things are very very good and there is also since last year an amendment to the equity design directive that is supposed to improve a right to repair so in the first step this applied to just a few products or product ranges like coolers washing machines dishwashers and displays so televisions meaning and it requires them to be repairable without special tools or at least the cases should be openable without special tools and that spare parts need to be supplied for a few years so it's I think it's seven years for the displays and 10 years for the for the appliances and repairing and service manuals need to be supplied now so this is already in effect as of last year yes the question was spare parts how does it work out in practice so in practice the rule is they need to be supplied within or provided within 15 days for professional repairers and there is no rule for the price of them either yeah unluckily and also there is no rule that keeps manufacturers from from bundling spare parts into giant modules like the rule doesn't tell them only to supply or provide the bearing of a washing machine drum it can be the whole drum including a bearing that can't be changed so this is not perfect yet is this what your question was about yeah thank you very good question um so what's going on this year in 2022 is that our European Parliament has voted for right to repair on April 7th and that means that the European Commission has to or should come up with a with an amendment to the directive in this fall 2022 and so the idea is that there should be incentive for repairs that could be for example text reductions or some kind of um vouchers like Austria already has this in place when you when you go there and you get your washing machine fixed and it costs 200 for labor and spare parts 200 euro then the Austrian government will pay 50 of that back so you only have to pay 100 this is really cool does the German state of Thuringia has that too now but only a limited budget I think yeah and of course the service manuals and software updates have to be provided for a certain period for a broader range of products and yeah and the the rest is is it's not very very concrete but devices should be more robust and easier to repair and where parts should be easy to replace this is it's always a question of definition but it's it's a start so another good thing is that consumer information about repairability should be improved and warranties extended best thing would be in in my mind you buy a washing machine that is projected for a 10 year lifetime and then you have a warranty for 10 years that would be the best thing then people can choose do I want the 300 euro machine that has a two-year lifetime or do I want the 1000 euro machine that has a 10-year life man the if you do the math then it's easy which one is the the better choice okay another thing is that is technically already illegal but it would be really illegal then the practice is leading to worse or worse and repair abilities that planned obsolescence should be banned yeah so if I put a little fuse in that breaks after two years or after the warranty is over then it would definitely be illegal yeah it hasn't exactly been proven in before a court I think that some manufacturers manufacturers put these kinds of things into devices but we all know that they exist like just think about printers which stopped working after the the little excess ink sponge is full when they think it's full yeah and another thing that should come is the digital product pass with QR codes that contains extra information about like energy consumption and repairability things like that I need a sip of water so friends already has a repairability index since last year for a couple of products and this number shows pretty much how difficult a product is to repair the bad thing is that the manufacturer manufacturers calculate the score by themselves and there are a few categories like the yeah manuals and stuff like that that can increase the score even though they aren't really easy to repair for example iFixit has the 36 easy steps that you have to do to switch a battery on a galaxy s21 and it still scores 8.2 which is absolutely ridiculous yeah in the united states it is illegal that companies all right it's not illegal to put them on but they are not a void you all know these warranty void stickers on devices since 1975 courts have ruled that yeah they don't mean anything technically and also it's very interesting that the american rights to repair movement got traction because of a very conservative groups of product group of products it's tractors by john deere yeah they put drm and stuff into their machines that would keep farmers from repairing their equipment on field imagine the tractor breaks they have to do they have to bring in the crops and yeah you can put it in the shop they have to fix it on spot that wasn't possible anymore and that was a real uproar and attraction to the right to repair movement last year president biden assigned an executive order empowering right to repair and there have been a couple of state legislations this year this is the last one being the fair repair act of new york in june germany has the round table for repairs which does lobbying and we i'm a member of that too and we managed to even get a right to repair into the coalition contract of the governing parties of this legislation period in germany and like i've already mentioned to ringer and austria subsidize repairs and just last week india has announced that they also want to introduce a right to repair law so what can we do please repair stuff for yourself youtube has a very good sometimes sometimes not so good videos of how to repair how to open things that happen again and again like what do i have to do if i need to switch the thermal paste of my notebook del x x y z or something like that um check that out i fix it has very many repair manuals very specific step by step with high res photography what do i have to do if i want to replace the display of my this and that phone um if you don't have the tools at home or if you aren't capable of doing it yourself come visit a repair cafe they'll show you how it works if it's possible or if you're already adept at repairing stuff please volunteer as a helper in a repair cafe or when you're a member of a maker space why don't you offer some consultation hours in your maker space where people can come with their devices or volunteer um at a at a repair event yeah and last but not least if you live in a rural area that doesn't have any repair cafe yet you can always open one there are there's the stichting repair cafe for the netherlands there are they are also active all over europe and they have their starters said um it is worth it it uh a british study so british studies show everything imagine what they have a study on it but this one shows that repairing actually has an impact on co2 reduction and uh it's yeah it's about one to ten kilo per kilo of device repaired um yeah what we personally can do as well is think twice before buying stuff especially gadgets especially iot crap which may just as well stop working next year when the manufacturer decides to turn off the cloud things like that do we really need it um yeah cherish and service and maintenance uh loop your uh loop your bicycle chain and stuff like that decalcify your coffee machine clean your vacuum cleaner filters that will extend their lifetime it's important and um use a warranty to the end if something is broken uh within the warranty time even if it's just the stupid led light bulb then get it replaced yeah it's that is it's something that yeah yeah sometimes they even have an extended warranty of like five years or something but it's uh it's a tedious process people uh or the manufacturers try to keep them yeah keep them from from uh using that and um of course another good thing is teach kids how to solder and do making classes soldering is a very important repair technique it is good if they know how to do it upcycling um if a tv main board is broken you can still use the backlight for a really cool shadow free desk light for example there are a bunch of initiatives um there is a fix fest which is an international repair conference in um brussels in september or end of september beginning of october that first weekend and there's also bits and boimer conference in berlin uh unluckily they're both at the same weekend my dream uh first one i already said uh if a product supposed to last 10 years please put it put a sticker on and then actually extend the warranty to that time and uh what we need is a really a uh europe-wide return system for functional or easily repairable goods um belgium has that with the kringwinkel uh you don't throw stuff away that you don't need anymore you give it to a central instance and then it's being given out again for a really low price are repaired um by by by some welfare jobs and um we have that in germany now for for people who have fled ukraine uh and they're um taking old laptops and computers and giving them away again to the refugees after installing a free open source um operating system on them yeah then of course some incentives for repairs would be nice as i've mentioned and also please always keep in mind regard the ecological impact of every purchase and social impact some people have to assemble these things and those people don't live good lives some people have to dig out tons of uh stuff from the earth to make uh enough uh cobalt for for a for a phone or for a car or whatnot please always consider that and not only the production also this the disposal is bad for our planet yeah eventually we'll become a degrowth society if we want it or not it is it would be better if we did it voluntarily and be prepared for it discussion we barely have any time for it maybe there are some questions if not you're invited to unterland village on olsenfield at 6 30 i would say in half an hour or so that would be great yeah 23rd person to show up gets a free smartphone repair kit from me hey did you hear that you guys you're lucky the one first of all before we start off thank you this was excellent may have a big applause for this cheers thanks i know that there's still 10 minutes for questions i pushed him a bit sorry about that sorry i hope i didn't rush through 2000 so there were some interesting questions and and maybe yeah yeah let and let's get to the microphone because i i think we have a few more yeah thanks for the very interesting discussion uh and talk um i think what i wanted to say is regarding uh warranties i think a lot of people aren't aware that the european law states that you have two years at least but it's at least so if it's a washing machine it the law is a bit vague unfortunately but i think it states something as as much warranty as you should be the lifespan should be yeah as the life as you as you could meaningfully expect the product to last which is vague which really helps the manufacturers to yeah get out of warranty claims yeah if we had if we really had a compulsory label where the manufacturer has to write the projected lifetime of a product on on the packing then people would be able to to choose and and really claim that right yes yeah that warranty yeah but that's not in the proposals yet it is all right yeah okay um yeah it isn't in the proposal that the lifetime has to be written on and the warranty has to be according that is not like that yeah unluckily okay but we're trying to push it that way keep pushing keep pushing that would be great a second question if i don't see anything anyone queuing up yet so yeah i attended a few repair cafes around the holland and i noticed the atmosphere was sometimes quite of the participants i mean more kind of like they brought their product dumped it and sometimes even went out they weren't really invested or really paying attention yeah do you have any tips maybe for uh how to to get the right kind of engagement let's say so we've seen that too the people were like misunderstanding the concept of a repair cafe as like a professional repair shop free repair professionally even free repair shop and uh we always made clear that um we're here on our free time and then we want people to understand and to help and at least watch if they don't have to to manually help um but um i think it's uh probably about communication like writing an article about what you do in your local newspaper with photos and stuff like that that always helps and we rarely get that so maybe once or twice a year yeah that's better good to hear thank you there's a few people lining up so let's bring it on hey um i often find myself in discussions with like companies that i buy products from and they claim to be very you know lifetime products and then something breaks and then they're like okay we'll send you like a new one and i'm like no i don't want a new one i want you to repair and a lot of times i also sort of offer them clues for like how they could like send repair kits to all of the people who have this broken and i don't know these are companies like for example Reigns you know the rain jacket from Denmark or Gregory from like Backpacks or Stenvy and it's always like very i never get to like a good solution um i just kind of want to create awareness for them to repair the stuff and so i guess none of the laws apply here but do you have maybe any tips of like how to communicate i think it's also mostly i communicate with a person who's not actually able to and i don't get to anyone who can influence that yeah so yeah that law is not in place yet but it's it's also supposed to be forbidden to throw away like new stock or just slightly defective and repairable stuff um but the problem is that that products aren't designed to be repairable anymore like a lot of times you can't even open a case of a product without destroying it or shoes or backpacks like you mentioned they are all glued together they can't be soon or anything and if they fail then they then sometimes they do fail for good and then they need to be replaced because even the manufacturer can't fix it but in these cases i actually fix it myself i mean the rain jacket but i want i want them to do it and i want them to also do it for other people i mean they were totally fixable actually i mean maybe they would have been could have been designed better but but they may not even have the facilities anymore thank you yeah thank you and indeed i think i i i see the problem that you wanted to repair it and and yeah you get a new one most people are happy about it yeah but yes but it's not the right thing yeah it doesn't make sense hi there thank you very much i was i was vague i was vaguely familiar with some of these movements initiatives in europe very pleased to learn more about it fascinating excellent stuff now from what i've seen it seems to me like the place that would be the most i don't know if i can say advanced but that has the strongest culture of repair like that and unfortunately not necessarily out of such noble motivations but more out of necessity is cuba it seems to me like cuba is the fix its country yeah i was wondering if there's been any formal or informal some kind of a exchange with the cuban repairers or if uh yeah thank you not that i'm aware of that's an excellent question and let me bring this up if you look on a map for repair initiatives then imagine the iron curtain they almost stop there so east of like germany poland is all already very sparse people there don't need to repair cafes because they can still do it they can still do it themselves and they do like i was in in romania a couple of years ago in a very very remote town of sulina their next hardware shop was two hours by ship there aren't even any roads there people need to be able to fix them their stuff on their own with and improvise and they do yes exactly they don't need repair cafes and cuba is probably the same way thank you for the suggestion thank you thanks a lot thank you and our last question for today hi i i don't really have a question i just have a suggestion um i know in switzerland there's a big initiative now trying to copy their repair vouchers they're very inspired and i've been pushing the local counselors to activate that so they're working actively on it and also they're trying to attach a reuse center to their recycling centers so if you can all contact your local counselors and push for that and say you want a reuse center for all your equipment because if you're also running a repair cafe i'm sure you know there's two on rails trying to get the spare parts often you can take it out of another machine that has a different part broken so that would also be nice to just collect all these things and spare parts absolutely excellent suggestion thank you very much please do that okay so that's it for tonight i would like you to thank you once more for this beautiful story again i love it in this in this that we are we're doing high tech and low tech at the same time and it doesn't really matter we just do hacks yeah exactly people