Our Open Repair dataset grows to 42,000 records

July 7, 2020

While community repair groups around the world have been forced to put their events on hold for the last few months, all members of the Open Repair Alliance continued to work on updating information and data collected until now.

Repair groups have been uploading data about previous events in platforms such as Repair Monitor, Restarters.net and Reparatur-Initiativen.

The Restart Project, on behalf of the Alliance, led on collecting updated versions of all datasets and combining them. This involved preparing them for aggregation, separating data about non-electrical products collected by some of the partners, and finally publishing the combined dataset as well as the individual sets from all partners.

The dataset grows by 42%

The aggregate dataset now includes 41,873 repair attempts up to the end of March 2020, an increase of 42% in the 6 months since the first aggregation. The growth of the dataset is very promising, as it shows that more and more repair groups around the world are collecting and happy to share data about the repairs performed by volunteers at their events. The data is shared following the Open Repair Data Standard (ORDS).

Downloading the data

The full updated dataset is now ready for download. If you’re interested in downloading the data, we now kindly ask you to let us know what you’re interested in, and how you intend to use the data. We’d also be happy to hear from other community repair networks and other groups with access to similar data on repair attempts. Get in touch if you’d like to share your data and contribute to our collective understanding of common faults and product repairability.

What’s next

In the next few months we’ll work on improving the standard, to make it easier to compare aggregated data from multiple sources, for example by defining and mapping a shared set of product categories, and by mapping a shared set of repair statuses, working across all partners.

Meanwhile we’re increasing our focus on analysing the data to contribute to policy opportunities. At European level, there’s growing momentum on regulating smartphones, and The Restart Project is planning to analyse all data submitted on smartphones to highlight key barriers to their repairability.

This work is partly funded by the EU Interreg project Sharepair, which aims to build a digital support infrastructure for citizens in the repair economy.