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Lightning Talk Beginner

Fixable : How do we resist the planned obsolescence problem?

Approved
Session Description

I will talk about how isfixable.com started and talk about hardware repairability from the consumers, not makers, point of view.

I presented a version of this talk earlier at MisinfoCon in March 2025 (recording is available here) and BarcampBangalore 2025 (session proposal).

Key Takeaways

  • How economic models have led to planned obsolescence of hardware products across categories

  • How we are crowdsourcing community knowledge

  • Govt initiatives and whether they will be effective

  • The goal is for buyers and repair-experts to empower each other, not "DIY" even though that is important

References

https://isfixable.com
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lykEkp6x3P5srGN-UGYMq26hMqnOjaaNhM00tpmEXTU/edit?slide=id.p#slide=id.p
https://github.com/nileshtrivedi/fixable

Session Categories

Other
Community
Which track are you applying for?
Open Hardware Devroom

Speakers

Nilesh Trivedi
Co-founder and CTO Snowmountain AI
https://x.com/nileshtrivedi
Nilesh Trivedi

Nilesh Trivedi is co-founder and CTO for Snowmountain AI. He's an active contributor to open-source projects and has worked on implementing decentralized social media protocols like ActivityPub. Recently he helped start Fixable - a community and a crowdsourced wiki for repairability of consumer hardware products in India. His personal website is at https://nilesh.trivedi.link/

Reviews

I think this talk will be useful for many attendees. As we are all consumers of many of the products, getting to attend such talks could create awareness.

Reviewer #1 Approved