Open Repair Data Standard aims to unify global electronics repair data

The Open Repair Alliance maintains ORDS, a shared schema for capturing data about attempted repairs of small electrical and electronic devices at community repair events. By forcing common field definitions across product, repair, and session metadata, the standard lets organizers aggregate fixes logged by independent groups and surface patterns — for instance, the most common failure modes in blenders across the UK or Europe — that would be invisible in siloed datasets.

Version 0.3, released in December 2021, is the current iteration. Earlier revisions added recommended values for repair status and product category, introduced fields for repair barriers and country, and dropped the model field after data-quality issues made it unusable. Combined datasets are republished every six months under a Creative Commons license, and the Alliance maintains a registry of compliant datasets.

Future work targets a controlled vocabulary for fault types and possible adoption of UNU-keys for product categorization. The standard is open to contributors, and its evolution is driven by lessons learned each time member datasets are merged.