Measuring impact

The Fixometer is a tool we use for measuring the impact of our repair events (devices fixed, waste and CO₂ emissions diverted) as well as to gain insights about reliability and repairability of different types and brands of device.

The Fixometer

For our community repair events we use the Fixometer, a purpose-built web application, to collect data on the things that we fix. We log all the fixes that we attempt — successful or not. We record information about each device, such as the model and brand, what the problem was, whether we could fix it, and whether spare parts were required. We then combine this data with our own research data of lifecycle assessments for electrical and electronics products. From these two datasets we produce detailed analysis on the positive environmental and social impacts of our work.

See https://therestartproject.org/fixometer/ for more information on our work on this so far, or if you have an account on Restarters.net, take a look at the Repairs section (https://restarters.net/device) to explore the data for yourself. The Fixometer is open source, so if you'd like to see the source code for the app itself go to: https://github.com/TheRestartProject/Fixometer

Open Repair Data Standard

We want to do more with data and the insights that it facilitates, so we are currently aiming to scale up the collection of data through various partnerships: with other community repair networks, and with trade associations of independent commercial repairers.

For this reason, we helped found the Open Repair Alliance in October 2017. We envisage a rapid growth in the data collected, and we wish to ensure this data is open and interoperable. As such, we are building a standard for the collection and sharing of open data on electronics repair. We are building the standard such that data collection on repair is open and interoperable, and can be used for impactful statistical analysis and visualisation.

See openrepair.org for more information.