RepairCafé booting...
The last few weeks I've been busy organizing a local RepairCafé. A RepairCafé is an event where a group of private persons meet and try to fix broken everyday stuff. Everyone is invited to visit and take broken items with them to repair them together with the people present, watch them (and learn) repairing the goods or just have a nice chat.
The idea for organizing a RepairCafé came to me several weeks back when I read about it somewhere on the Internet. Shortly after that I visited the Barcamp Graz 2013 where I had a talk with a group of other interested people and decided to take on the task and try to set up such an event in the near future (see also this post from May).
Well, some meetings and many new connections and contacts later, last Saturday the first RepairCafé took place at the Traumwerk open shop together with a clothing change event organized at the same time. We chose that event to attract some more people than we could reach independendly from each other and I think (at least from the RepairCafé position) this worked quite well.
There haven't been so many people who took the chance and brought in broken stuff but there was a bunch of people who just heard of the event when they were already there. And it seemed to be an interesting idea to most of them so that we were often asked how often this took place or when the next event is planned. Not too bad I guess.
Currently I'm finding a date for the next public meeting to have a short recap on Saturdays event and plan or discuss our future steps.