 Rwy'n dod ar gyfnod o'r ffordd. First of all, we have one speaker and then we're going to have a panel discussion which I'm really looking forward to. Without further ado, let me welcome Hugo Vellorey and talking about something that's very dear to my heart. I'll let him introduce. I didn't bring you any slides, but I decided to bring you a story. It's a story of what last year I received a special present. Mae'r unig yw'r unig yw'r ysgrifennu, oherwydd mae hyn ymgyrch yn ymweld mawr, wrth gwrs y mawr yw'r ysgrifennu. Mae'r ysgrifennu a mae'r ysgrifennu yn gweld i'r ffawr fy amser, ac yn gwybod, mae'r gwheilio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Dyna'r hwn. Fyddwn i'n meddwl bod ydych chi'n gweithio'n gweithio, rwy'n meddwl, rwy'n meddwl i'ch defnyddio'n gweithio. I generally love technology and want to make the most of it, so I learn to control it, to make sure it wouldn't disturb me all of the time with the multiple level of notifications that these things can have, so we had a good relationship. And then actually something went very wrong. One day I take it off, just as I'm doing now, and I have to charge it, so I charge it because it thinks as marked as they are, they need to be charging all of the time. And the next morning when I try to put it back on, it dies. And what happened? It was exactly a year and perhaps two weeks after the end of the warranty. And so that led me down very much. But there's actually worse to it. It's not just that, so I go online, of course, and it turns out that the manufacturer that had come up with this watch had since folded, had been bought by another manufacturer. And the first thing that this manufacturer did was to discontinue all level of support and all the products and services around that device. Just one final software update, and that was it. End of story. And of course that means there is no place to repair this product anywhere in the world, also because it was kind of a niche product that was supported by a crowdfunding campaign, like many excellent makers' products. And there's no repair manuals for that very specific model of the device. There are no spare parts available, and I have nothing that I can do about it. So it's probably a battery problem in this case, and it's really hard. You go on all kinds of websites online and you just cannot find that very battery. Or it's in some obscure website, you're not so sure that it will give you the answer you're after. So for me it was kind of an easy solution. I put it aside, like most people do because I spent a lot of time, and while I do like to repair things, at times you just don't have the time to do it. And guess what I did? I brought back from the dead my good old 11-year-old watch, which is perhaps not as smart as this one, but when I come to it, think about it. It is solar powered, it's worked for 11 years, it's seen better days, but it's never let me down. And despite not connecting to the internet, it can somehow magically connect to some satellites and all throughout Europe always know what time exactly it is, without being a connected device. Magic. So I suspect that I'm not really the only one in this room that has had similar experience. Perhaps not with a smartwatch, perhaps it was with that printer or with that phone or laptop or any other device. Make some noise if you had experienced a similar thing and it's frustrated the hell out to you. Exactly. All of us in this room have had this problem sooner or later, or we will have this problem. So it's not obviously just about batteries, it's about how products are designed, manufactured, marketed to us, and how the level of support to this product is way less than stellar. What can we do about this? Five years ago, my friend Janet Gunter and I had an idea and we decided we would throw the first of many restart parties in a small pub in north London. It was a Saturday afternoon. Someone made me think, well actually it was a sunny summer afternoon in London. Like there's not that many of them. And people came out to volunteer or to take things to repair. People that we have never met. Of course, a few friends as well. But I'll never forget the woman who had cycled with her printer on her bike for five miles to get to this place because she was too frustrated to give up on her printer. And I'll never remember the man who arrived with a suitcase full of tools and he didn't need any explanation. Somehow we both knew what had to happen. We had never spoken before and he started fixing straight away like a machine. But like a human really because it wasn't just fixing, it was engaging in conversations without trying to explain why that alarm clock could still have a second lease of life. Fast forward to 2017. Soon we realized that this was not going to be just a hobby and we created an organization that's called the ReStar Project which aims to inspire people not just to fix things but to really rethink our relationship with electronics and small electricals. To really renegotiate who owns what and what level of control we have over the devices that are increasingly controlling our lives. We all have so many gadgets and increasingly increasingly we have even more of them with more connected devices popping up all of the time. And yet we seem to be losing control of them and not being able to decide when to upgrade, when to buy the next one and when to just make the most of what we already have. In five years the ReStar Project has started supporting groups in more than ten countries to run their own pop-up repair events. We developed an educational program where we support teachers to inspire people, young people to think in a more holistic way about the challenges of electronics and the environment. Right because the environment is key to all of this. So in 2018 it is projected we will have 50 million tonnes of electronic waste around the world. Now that number might mean nothing to you but it means that this mass of electronic waste is growing at a rate of approximately 5% year on year. What's even more worrying is that while we all feel guilty when we see the pictures of how people in places like Ghana are trying to recycle in a DIY way electronics and the health conditions that they experience doing that. We don't really do enough to look in our own backyard. We don't do enough to see how personally we can make a difference. And so it's easy to get upset about that just as much as it is easy to say oh it's cute that people are doing community repair events around the world. But there's something to it that's more profound and something that we can all learn something from. We're not just doing this because it's fun to have a community event where volunteers shares with others. We're doing this because it is important to increase people's awareness about the true impact of the products we own. I spoke about electronic waste but actually we should be speaking a lot more about the embodied carbon in all the products we buy. It's not just about how much they weight. In fact they weight less and less every year and that's part of the problem. The embodied carbon, the footprint of this product seems to be increasing at a really worrying rate. And we have to take action. We the people who develop the software and the hardware for this product. We the people who consume it. We the citizens who should be a lot more concerned about what's happening. We're not working in isolation. There's plenty of others that are doing similar work. Thankfully in the last few weeks we've launched the very first international repair day. Don't forget it will be celebrated on the third Saturday of October. So just one week before most best every year to come. We had about 70 events around the world to celebrate this and we expect a lot more happening in the next few years. Even more importantly we've launched an open repair alliance with people running repair cafes around the world. Fixed clinics and a lot more. And the idea of this is that together citizen action can bring out the stories that currently are just purely speculative about what are the recurrent faults that people can or cannot fix at community event. Why should the design of products really change to make an impact in the way products can become again more repairable rather than less repairable. Why is this crucial for the future of a healthy internet? Well more and more devices are connected internet and things or internet of things as people call them. And this is not coming without some level of trouble. Firstly we are seeing products that are increasingly miniaturised. What that means is it's becoming increasingly hard to open them to repair them and give them a second lease of life. I'll give you a small example. There are laptops out there today that if you break the keyboard you will have to replace the whole top case of the laptop which is worth about two thirds of the whole machine. Not just one key that you could have bought for 50pence or 50 cents. And you can no longer upgrade the memory of these products for example. But there's something even more deeply worrying. The conversation around the internet of things is currently very much focused around the security and increasingly the safety around using these products. The security because of the data breaches and our data being exploited by third parties without us even knowing. Safety because some of these products are used to save people's lives and they can become at the heart of problems, cars, face makers and the likes. But these are symptoms of something bigger that's happening and that we're not realising full. Basically products are no longer supported sufficiently. More products include software inside them that theoretically is there to be updated over time. But practically the support to these products end at times much sooner than the company is willing to provide a warranty for that product which is probably insane. But I bet most of you have a home as smart TV and you realise quite quickly that some of the apps that it came with are not really working on that TV anymore. Perhaps the machine is still under warranty and yet you're stuck and you might want to start thinking about what's next. No, you really shouldn't. You can still fix it and find alternatives but you get the idea. So it's becoming pretty much paradoxically that it's not even about fixing a product. What's the point of being able to fix a product as in repair it if it's broken. If the software that runs on that product is no longer supported and ultimately will make that product useless. It's coming to the point where this is a reality. It's not like some distant future dystopian. It's something that's happening here and now. And it's not to even mention what's happening when a manufacturer decides to provide a software update which actually makes the product too slow to continue using. Or even worse, if this is happening in the last month, releases a software update that renders all non-certified genuine spare parts incompatible and makes the product no function anymore. This is happening now and while we discuss about how nice it is to think about maybe a fridge of the future where you can simply order automatically your milk when you run out. And you know all these nice utopians less dystopians scenarios. There's actually something that's happening here and now and somehow we become complicit because we like the slick devices that are designed and whatnot. But I'd like to give you some hope because it's up to us to do something about all of this and there's a lot that we can do. As individuals, we can all take part in communities that are promoting a healthier approach to the devices that we use. So next time you break something, don't despair. Just walk to your community repair event, whether it's a restart party, a club de reparadores in South America, a reparathon in North America in Canada, a repair café or whatever else. And if you're technical, share your skills and you'll learn a lot from the participants that you'll engage with. If you're desperate about trying to fix a device, bring the device with you and you'll learn something about it. But a lot of people in this room are very technical and they're deeply involved in making the internet a better place. If you are a software developer, if you are a hardware developer, if you are a maker, if you think about crowdsourcing your future device, think about how you can put people and the planet at the heart of your design process. Think about the services you're developing as something that should live longer than just the warranty period of the device. And try to think about support in the open, free and open source communities that are at the heart of enhancing and prolonging the life of the products that we already own. Perhaps more importantly, act as a citizen first, not just thinking about buying the next product or making the most of a product, but let's use our connected voices. And let's tell the better story of how products supported for longer can be more powerful and helpful for everyone. One last thing. I've spoken to many designers, engineers that are at the heart of developing the products that we all use. I spoke to previous developers of the iPhone and they all agree with us that it's nonsense that products don't last as long as we decide them to last. So as individuals we all agree, but we have a strong chance to tell a better story convincing manufacturers, regulators and designers to jump on board and say no to unnecessary waste. Thank you. There's a burning passion at the back. It's very bright. Sorry, so if you don't have a restart cafe near you, as unfortunately a lot of people in Britain do, rather don't, isn't there already a framework for this in the form of repair shops we can go to? Is it sustainable to rely on open community which is unpaid? Absolutely far from saying that open communities are the only solution. In fact they are one small part of a bigger solution. We increasingly know that the challenges that we face as community repair activists are exactly the same that trustworthy repairs across the world experience lack of access to good parts to manuals and the threat that even if you install a third party screen on the phone next time you update the software it will be rejected. So we are very much in favour of returning to a repair economy, a thriving repair economy, except that the moment it seems to be concentrating on very high value devices like mobile phones and tablets and increasingly unavailable for products like this. So we need to support all kinds of commercial and non-profit initiatives that go, that promote a different alternative, yeah. I was wondering what you know about regulations that might be in place against the planned obsolescence design that is starting to just break at the moment. So there are multiple initiatives happening in the US. There is a growing movement around the right to repair which touches upon the IP and the control over that manufacturers have in allowing or not allowing independent repairs to do their work. At the EU level there is work around the circular economy on multiple fronts but not yet around the software obsolescence that we see at the heart of tomorrow's problems. So we're trying to bring that voice but we're desperately behind and in a sense there's a lot of people thinking about this in the context of connected cars and not realising that this is the same for your music players, for all we are out of devices. So a lot more is needed in that respect.