[hackerspaces] Repair Cafes - A great idea for hackerspaces

[Mars brown]

I know those signs...
Perhaps it should be
"100$ for me to fix it, 50$ for you to watch, and 25$ for you to learn and
do it yourself!"

The space I'm working on getting going is temp on hold a bit... mostly
because it quickly became a dozen people wanting to come by 3 times a week
wanting me to "help" build stuff... breaking point was a particularly nasty
attitude person pissed off and storming around complaining to everyone
because I couldn't focus on just her project.  :(  the next week we went
from a dozen people showing up to 3 (including me)

I do like this idea - and I would totally be into this if I were there...
but anyone I helped wouldn't be able to get away without getting an earful
of how to and this is a ____ and you can use a meter to test this like
this... etc etc.




On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 1:55 PM, dosman <dosman at packetsniffers.org> wrote:

> 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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> > Discuss at lists.hackerspaces.org
> > http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
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