bring maker faire to your community

One of my favorite parts of Maker Faire is seeing makers come out of their shell to share their creations with the world. Time after time we meet someone who thinks their work isn’t good enough, we convince them to exhibit and they spend a magical weekend connecting with others who appreciate their craft.

Maker Faire is not an event that has to do strictly with people making hardware. For me it’s much more important because it opens up channels of communication between makers and the concept of making together. We are happy to show what makers can do and how they could collaborate toward a future of great open source projects and, later, bringing benefit to communities around the world.

Making "things" is fine, but how do we make opportunities? How do we make more makers? How do we communicate, model, and inspire others to action? I believe firmly that to be a human being is to be curious, to be a problem solver, to be creative. Add the notion of community, we are better together and you start to see what a "maker" really is or can be.

All of the Bits we brought to our (Maker Faire) booth were handmade; they kept failing and we kept having to jiggle them to make them work. To be honest, we felt like frauds at that first Maker Faire. But at the same time Maker Faire was an incredible experience because I needed the feedback to iterate. Kids were lining up at our booth to get a glimpse of our Bits. We even set up a wall called “Submit your Bit” which invited people to suggest the Bits we should create next, from a light sensor to a buzzer or an LED matrix to a “fart sensor” or even a “penguin finder.” It was so exciting to think of the possibilities.

This community doesn’t belong to anyone, nor is any one person or company at the center of it. Perhaps that is one of reasons, the loose-knit maker community has a chance to endure.

"Make something. Anything. Weld, carve, cook, sculpt, sew. Make something in the world that wasn't there before."

I love how Maker Faire is a living organism, like a city, where things happen spontaneously even though nobody planned them.

For makers, a sense of community hits you like a wave as soon as you walk into a Maker Faire, large or small.

If you want to see girls in science making themselves and everyone around them proud, then get thee to a Maker Faire! Our job, as I see it, is to facilitate those girls and then get out of their way, because they’re about to change the world.

It has been my personal mission to make sure that people of all backgrounds, young, old, black, brown and white alike, have an exposure to building and creating and making – whatever they are passionate about. It has been my goal to let them see themselves in the countless individuals before them that have been wood makers, textile makers, engineers, artists, tinkerers, hobbyists, craftspeople, and more...To envision themselves as scientists, programmers, engineers, and artists, all through the act of making...To understand that making is the portal to a world so much larger than they could even imagine. And to have them realize that the limits of what they can make are only self-defined.

At the Maker Faire it is fantastic to see thousands of young school kids and old graybeards and moms all elbowing each other to see the latest in workshop tools, science kits, how-to books, demos, seminars on making drones or tempeh, and cool stuff made just because you can. Every year there is something new.