Posts of Sarah Rahimi RSSSat, 05 Aug 2023 07:30:56 GMTLast weekend I took the train to London to visit three repair cafés and one makerspace, notebook in hand. Our Utrecht network has been running fix-it days for a while, and I wanted to see what others do differently. The cover photo is from the walk back along the river on Saturday night, tired and very happy.1. A proper triage deskEvery café I visited had one person at the door whose only job was to ask "what's wrong with it?" and send people to the right table. Waiting times were shorter and fixers weren't interrupted mid-repair. We've done this informally until now. From September it becomes a fixed role on our rota.2. Write every repair downOne café logs every item: what it was, what was wrong, and whether it got fixed. After a year they could tell me that toasters and vacuum cleaners make up a third of their visits, and that most "broken" lamps only need a new switch. That tells them which volunteers and spare parts to bring.3. Fixers teach, visitors doWhenever it was safe, the visitor held the screwdriver. People leave having learned something, and they come back as volunteers far more often.4. Safety without fussMains-powered items were tested before going home, and nobody opened a microwave. A few simple rules on the wall, applied to everyone, regulars included.Weekend totals: 3 cafés, 1 makerspace, 63 items seen, 41 fixed, and one very stubborn sewing machine that defeated four people. I'll bring the full notes to our next coordinators' meeting and post a summary in Repair Café Volunteers afterwards.

]]>Sat, 05 Aug 2023 07:30:56 GMTWhen our makerspace network moved sign-ups off paper forms and onto our own community site, I realised how much personal data a small volunteer group quietly collects: names, emails, emergency contacts, which machines someone is trained on and who holds an access card for the front door. None of it is glamorous, but all of it needs looking after.This is the checklist we now run through every spring. It isn't legal advice, just what works for volunteer-run spaces around Utrecht.Collect lessEvery field on a form is something you have to protect. We dropped date of birth, home address and "how did you hear about us" from our sign-up form. If we need an emergency contact for a laser cutter induction, we ask for it at the induction and keep it only while the person is an active member.Give fewer people the keysOnly three coordinators have admin rights on the site. Workshop leads get moderator rights for their own group and nothing more.Every admin account uses two-factor login.Access cards are logged in one place, and a lost card is switched off the same evening.Clean up on a scheduleOnce a year we remove accounts that haven't been active for 18 months, after sending a friendly heads-up first. Old volunteer rota sheets get deleted, not archived "just in case".Practise the bad dayWe keep backups, and twice a year someone actually restores one onto a spare laptop. The first attempt took four hours and two pots of coffee. Now it takes forty minutes.A printable version of this checklist goes up in Local Makers Collective next week, for anyone running a space of their own.

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