MAKE’s first International Maker Meetup yesterday was a hit. Around the world there were 126 meetups with more than 800 participants.
Here in Sebastopol, Calif. in MAKE’s office we had a meetup with more than 70 attendees. The free beer and pizza was part of the appeal, but folks mainly came to see 10 3D printers doing there thing and to talk shop. While all that was going on, our skipper Gareth Branwyn hosted a Google+ Hangout On Air with 3D printing enthusiasts across the country while a steady stream of meet up attendees joined him on-air. G+ and the internets were a little wonky, but patience and a sense of humor prevailed.
MAKE gave the highest attended meetups in New York City, Seattle, Columbus, Ohio, and Austin a $200 stipend for food and drink, along with bags of merch for wrangling the most attendees. Congratulations. Hope you liked the beer. Here’s what the good folks at Columbus Idea Foundry had to say. They had the greatest number of attendees (72):
A week ago we sprang into action when we heard that MAKE magazine was planning an international 3D printing meetup day. Over the past 48 hours we raced to gather RSVPs, competing with makerspaces around the world for MAKE’s $200 prize for the top-3 events. With 71 RSVPs, we were the #1 attended event worldwide (closely followed by New York and Austin). And we put the money to good use, paying for plenty of food and drinks!
Thanks to everyone who came out to celebrate with us! We were thrilled with the turn out!
Throughout the evening we had 10 different 3D printers humming away printing out all sorts of goofy demo-objects: a Sasquatch head, a tiny squirrel figurine, gears, a mustache comb, and more seriously, the plastic body for a DIY hand-cranked dynamo flashlight kit.
We also tuned in for the Google+ Hangout, a live video chat between the editors of MAKE and participating makerspaces around the world. Ethan Dicks, the organizer of tonight’s event, did us proud representing us and chatting live with Gareth Branywyn, Editorial Director of MAKE (Listen to their discussion here!). For a bunch of hardware hackers, we had some technological foibles getting the video up and running, but overall we think it was a great success!
Thanks to everyone who participated. We’re going to do it again before the publication of our next issue, in late January.
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