Together with four partners, Repair Café International has started the Open Repair Alliance, a partnership of organisations promoting more repairable products. The Alliance was launched on 6 October 2017 in London during Fixfest, a conference for repair activists from all over the world.
Community repair
The other founding members are The Restart Project (UK), Fixit Clinic (US), Anstiftung Foundation (Germany) and iFixit (US). All these organisations are active in the field of ‘community repair’; they facilitate the sharing of repair skills at community gatherings, or via internet.
The members of the Alliance are concerned about decreasing reparability of products, which generates unacceptable amounts of waste, with huge environmental impact across the world. “As organisations supporting community repair, we have an important role to play”, says Ugo Vallauri of The Restart Project. “We can share the evidence of the work we do, recurrent faults and challenges in repairing them, in order to promote and demand more reparability.”
Stronger together
“Together, we can present a much stronger case to manufacturers, designers, policy-makers and consumers”, Martine Postma of Repair Café International adds. The members of the Alliance are going to align their systems of data collection as well as possible, so that the datasets can easily be compared. Martine: “This will make it possible to draw general conclusions.”
International Day of Repair
The Alliance also agreed upon an International Day of Repair, to be celebrated every year on the third Saturday of October, starting with Saturday 21 October 2017. This international celebration is designed to always coincide with International Repair Café Week.
Want to know more? Check the website of the Open Repair Alliance.
[…] in conjunction with their launch of the Open Repair Alliance, the Restart Project also announced that Saturday, October 21 would be International Repair Day. […]