Urban Mining Workshop

anon30133089 · March 2, 2015, 9:42am

Hi everyone,

Have you ever looked inside a mobile phone? I personally never took any phones apart before joining Fairphone. Moreover, never did I think that this process could be so much fun and that I would learn so much from this experience.

At Fairphone, we’ve been conducting Urban Mining Workshops for a while and they’ve been such a success, that today we are passing the tools over to you. I am very happy that our Urban Mining Manual is now available for free download. It contains the necessary instructions for you to host your Urban Mining Workshop in either a classroom, workplace or as a great hangout idea with a group of pals. The workshop is designed to open up your old, nonworking mobile phone and explore the stories behind it. I’ve shared more about it on our blog.

I really hope that many of you will find our Urban Mining Manual useful and have a lot of fun organising this eye-opening workshop. And I am so curious to hear about your impressions that I’m opening up this discussion. How did your Urban Mining Workshop go? Let’s exchange experiences here!

Stefan · March 2, 2015, 10:02am

THANK YOU VERY MUCH! I will consider this for the next community meetup of the Austrian Fairphoners.

Indeed I have opened up a phone before I got the FP, which was a Samsung SGH-E250 (it was really green ;)). I broke it during the process though and couldn’t repair it. Repairing a FP is definitely easier! Still interesting to see, what was inside this Samsung!

PS.: I see a big black “X” on the Library page. I believe this is not intended?
Also the link to the blog post was dead, I corrected it.

anon30133089 · March 2, 2015, 10:44am

Hi Stefan, thanks! Have you tried to clean your cache?

ben · March 2, 2015, 12:55pm

Hi @anon30133089,

great blog! I wanted to take a look a that manual and have the same issues with the download page as @Stefan has. See my screenshot below:

Note that i can actually scroll inside this small window with the X and noticed there is a form hiding . Seems like a little CSS glitch.

danielsjohan · March 2, 2015, 1:12pm

I can see the form, but I can’t click on the download-button. Or rather: I can click. But that’s it. Nothing happens

anon30133089 · March 2, 2015, 1:18pm

Thanks everyone for your feedback! We’re working on fixing the problems. We’ve switched off the form for now so you can download the document. Thrilled to hear your feedback about our Urban Mining Manual!

Stefan · March 2, 2015, 2:00pm

@ben what I was seeing was a little bit different. I was on Firefox (Windows) and there was literally a black “X” covering the whole display!

@anon30133089 I’ll check later, if it works for me now!

anon30133089 · March 2, 2015, 2:12pm

@danielsjohan could you please let me know which browser (and version) you used so we can fix the problem?

danielsjohan · March 2, 2015, 3:11pm

When I tried, it was on a Firefox browser (as far as I know, the latest version).

I’ll try it again tomorrow!

Stefan · March 2, 2015, 9:48pm

The really big black “X” disappeared and the form opens correctly now. The problem now is though, that I cannot scroll it. I cannot see anything beneath “Type of your organisation”.

I am using Firefox 35.0.1 on Windows 7 Professional 64bit

Edit: Firefox 36.0 also doesn’t work.

danielsjohan · March 3, 2015, 8:14am

Now it works for me. The form has disappeared…

Stefan · March 3, 2015, 10:24am

Yeah, here too…

anon30133089 · March 4, 2015, 1:25pm

@danielsjohan and @Stefan so what do you guys think about the manual?

anon30133089 · March 4, 2015, 1:26pm

@ben you should be able to download the manual now

danielsjohan · March 4, 2015, 1:45pm

It looks nice. I will try to do a workshop at the office later this year (since team building activities have been banned, we try to find budget-friendly alternatives ).

Maybe it could be useful to put more detail (pictures?) in the list of tools you will need?
And is a powerpoint presentation-version of the miner’s guide available? I could be easy to have something to show on a screen, I guess.

paulakreuzer · March 4, 2015, 1:50pm

Also guides in different languages would be nice. I’m quite good at understanding english but I can’t do anything with the english names of elements and metals (copper, tin, tantalum).

anon30133089 · March 4, 2015, 2:44pm

@danielsjohan thanks for your feedback and it’s great to hear you want to try organising the workshop!

Basically, the more tools you will have, the better. Phones are different so you would need diverse screwdrivers etc.

We have compiled the pictures used in the manuals in our Flickr album - you could use them to make slides.

anon30133089 · March 4, 2015, 2:45pm

@paulakreuzer thanks for this! English manual is the first step

Stefan · April 7, 2015, 11:23am

@anon30133089 Hey! I couldn’t find the Urban Mining Manual on my computer anymore so I tried to download it again, which led to an error saying “This e-mail is already subscribed to the list.”

I don’t really understand why people should not be able to download the manual again, but anyways, is there a way to get it a second time?

Edit: The direct download link is the following:

http://www.fairphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Fairphone-Urban-Mining-Manual.zip

It’s kind of frustrating that the FP community has to face such obstacles in downloading a file like this. Isn’t it intended to use and share?

anon30133089 · April 7, 2015, 12:34pm

Hi @Stefan,

I am sorry for this. Thanks a lot for your feedback, I totally agree that our community should be able to download the manual as many times as they need - indeed the main goal is that people use it and share. We’ll try our best to provide this opportunity - we need to find a way around the authentication process that denies a double subscription to ‘protect’ us to not receive tons of invalid double emails.