First sharing of repair data by members

We are excited to share that all members of the Open Repair Alliance have shared the dimension of their growing data sets, demonstrated adherence to the Open Repair Data Standard, and almost all have begun to share insights from their data. The next step will be to publish raw data for reuse and analysis by third parties.

It’s remarkable to see how fix rates of electronics and electricals seem to be consistent in all of the data we’ve compared, between 54-61%.

We also share challenges of helping/encouraging grassroots groups to upload and share their data, and challenges related to the categorisation of products.

Anstiftung

The German organisation helping to collect and aggregate repair data now has 15 groups active on its platform. It is sharing results here, based on just under 1,000 repair attempts. The current success rate is about 61%. Anstiftung also models the environmental benefits of repairs through its platform.

Fixit Clinic

The US-Based Fixit Clinic reports logging 400 repair outcomes through a shared form, compliant with the Open Repair Data Standard, and used by groups in a handful of states. The main challenge is analysing the data. We hope to see more data from Fixit Clinic soon.

Repair Cafe

The Repair Café Foundation released a report on its RepairMonitor, a tool tested with 34 groups in Australia, Holland, the UK and the US. The report is an exhaustive review of nearly 8,000 repair attempts and makes for excellent reading. (Full report is available in Dutch currently, but you can find a summary in English here.) As might be expected, electrical and electronics repairs posed the greatest challenge, in comparison with clothes and bikes.

Many problems could have been prevented by more robust design of mainly electrical appliances. The most common problems found, when these items are brought to the Repair Café, are wire breaks, worn gears, broken switches and buttons, reduced battery capacity etc

Restart Project

The London-based network has 60+ groups across the globe using its Fixometer tool, and logging over 10,000 repair attempts. To celebrate this milestone and Open Data Day, Restart undertook analysis of its most commonly seen product, laptops. Clear patterns emerged about the barriers to repair. Read more about the results here.

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