Community Build Projects: Tips from the Trenches
Empire State Maker Faire 2020
October 16th-17th
From a set of giant light-up letters for the Obama White House, to a monumental 3D-printed sculpture of Rosie the Riveter, Jen has been the mastermind behind a growing list of interactive community build projects, inviting dozens - or sometimes hundreds - of collaborators from around the world building something together!
Whether you are interested in organizing your own community build effort, or just want to learn more about the magic (and madness) that happens behind the scenes, Jen shares her "tips from the trenches" about how to run successful and memorable collaborations.
You'll learn about some of the highlights and pitfalls of past projects, plus tips for recruiting and organizing other makers, coordinating build logistics, fundraising, and documenting and publicizing your project.
By engaging collaborators across disciplines and geographic borders, we're able to create something together no one individual could make alone - and the experience can be some of the most fun and rewarding making you've ever been part of!
Jen Schachter
Jen is a maker and mastermind of big, collaborative builds- a set of giant light-up letters for the Obama White House, an interactive puzzle hunt for SXSW, a monumental 3D-printed sculpture of Rosie the Riveter, and most recently, a crowd-sourced replica of the Apollo 11 hatch for the National Air and Space Museum. You can catch her on TV as a fabricator on the set of Savage Builds, find her product reviews in Make: Magazine, her tool manuals at fabrication shops in Baltimore, and her builds with Adam Savage on Tested.com. Jen lives and makes in the Bay Area, where she works as Director of Special Projects at Adam Savage's legendary "Cave" workshop, and is a frequent contributor on Tested.
