[hackerspaces] Repair Cafes - A great idea for hackerspaces

[dosman]

I like the idea, but I think a slight modification of this into "we'll help you fix it yourself" rather than "we'll just fixit for you" would be in order. For our space at least, we already get too many people coming to us with projects like "I want to pay you to build X for me". That sounds nice, but all of us already have full time jobs and plenty of our own projects we'd like to work on. If someone wanted help fixing their own stuff, I'd hand them a screwdriver, tell them where to point it and help them use a volt-ohm meter to diagnose. They would learn (part of our mission), and in some cases they would likely resolve the problem too.

This reminds me of a sign in the back of a TV repair shop I used to work at: "It's $25 for me to fix it, $50 for you to watch, and $100 for you to fix it". That's not quite in the same spirit as this issue, but I always thought it was funny.

-dosman

On May 9, 2012, at 1:57 PM, Buddy Smith wrote:

> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/world/europe/amsterdam-tries-to-change-culture-with-repair-cafes.html?_r=1
> 
> When I saw this, I immediately thought that we should begin discussing it.
> 
> A snippet:
> 
> At Amsterdam’s first Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a
> theater’s foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a
> community center a couple of times a month, people can bring in
> whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who
> just like to fix things.
> 
> Conceived of as a way to help people reduce waste, the Repair Cafe
> concept has taken off since its debut two and a half years ago. The
> Repair Cafe Foundation has raised about $525,000 through a grant from
> the Dutch government, support from foundations and small donations,
> all of which pay for staffing, marketing and even a Repair Cafe bus.
> 
> --buddy
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