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

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/

https://x.com/nileshtrivedi