Maker Faire

Maker Faire is the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth — a family-friendly festival of invention, creativity, and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the maker movement.

Part science fair, part county fair, and part something entirely new, Maker Faire is an all-ages gathering of tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students, and commercial exhibitors. All of these people come to Maker Faire to show what they have made and to share what they have learned.

Explore below to see the best of Maker Faire, and head to makerfaire.com for more information.

“DIY is an Instigator of Community”: Dale Dougherty Chats with Etsy

“DIY is an Instigator of Community”: Dale Dougherty Chats with Etsy

In this great little Etsy Q&A, MAKE Founder and Publisher Dale Dougherty chats about the evolution of MAKE, resourcefulness, and how making is a sign of caring for others: “That’s really the heart of what led me to focus on ‘amateurs’ at Maker Faire and with the magazine. The root of the word amateur is ‘to love.’ I wanted to focus on people who really love what they are doing and making. I wanted to find that place and stick with it.”

Seb Lee-Delisle

Seb Lee-Delisle: Playing With Code

The last 12 months have been a busy time for Seb Lee-Delisle. With a buzzing schedule of speaking, creative coding workshops, exhibitions and public events, it looks like this is the year he’s found his feet as a digital artist.

His path has taken many turns. He started by dropping out of a computer science degree, then hopping around various creative digital disciplines, from desktop publishing to music production. In the early 2000s he began to carve out a career in multimedia production for the web. A growing client list led him to set up his own agency, Plug-in Media. But client work began to take its toll:

“We were doing probably the best work you could imagine, very creative, for high-profile clients, but the thing I realised was, even with the best clients, ” he said. “I only spent about 10 percent of my time doing the stuff I really wanted to do and the other 90 percent negotiating, in meetings, scheduling, budgeting, and team management – all this extra stuff, which I wasn’t that interested in doing. It was frustrating; I just wanted to do that 10 perent.”

Roll Your Own Crowdfunding: The Scout Story

Roll Your Own Crowdfunding: The Scout Story

Recently, we unveiled our Scout pre-order site to the world. Scout is a hassle-free, do-it-yourself home security system. You can check it out at www.scoutalarm.com. We took a gamble with the Scout project and “rolled our own” crowdfunding site. Similar to Lockitron, Scout would not be allowed on Kickstarter since our products haven’t been produced yet, so we had to forgo that avenue for fundraising and strike out on our own. Luckily, Lockitron made our path a little easier by open sourcing its project.

The Scout project is, thus far, not wildly oversubscribed like Lockitron, but we’re doing well for being two weeks in. What we’ve realized in the process is that there’s not a lot of information available on what it takes to roll your own crowdfunding site. We’re one of only a handful of companies that has taken a shot at it, so we want to pass along what we’re learning as we go. Hopefully, this post will make it a little easier for the next company that follows behind us.