Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Open Source Rocks at Maker Faire Europe”.
Hi, so my name is Jonathan cook, I’m from the Bay Area, San Francisco, California, and standing right here in a middle of Rome in the middle of Maker Faire room 2014. Many people probably are wondering. Why am I here? Well, i’m here, because i love Adreno stuff and have been playing around with Adreno projects for years and finally had some time a few months ago to really sit down and prototype out a project. I’Ve really been interested in a lot of wearable technology. As you know, stuff has really been kind of exploding the past couple of years, and I decided to build my own little kind of open source Adreno based watch.
That can do a lot of things that your average kind of SmartWatch can do and built it, and they were happen to be an Adreno, go to Rome, maker, fair competition set my project in website, etc, etc, and all of a sudden, I got this email saying That I was being sent to Rome. The experience here is, is just amazing everything from the city of Rome itself, which is just an awesome place to be, especially as a non-native Italian at all to come here and just explore. The experience is awesome and then coming to actual Maker Faire. So this really juxtaposition of what I would say was the heart.
I mean we think of like all of the original makers that came from this area and then to be in front of Maker Faire and surrounded by a different culture, doing the same basic ideas of let’s create, let’s make from the educational to the really creative music Bands to simple little people simba little projects trying to help people learn how to program. It’S just it’s amazing, and it’s really kind of this interesting sense of being in a foreign country, but then all of this familiarity I was, I had been to bury a maker faire a few times and was definitely keeping the back of my head. Difference is what you know. I didn’t know what to expect.
Honestly, I didn’t know if it’s gon na be a small venue or a larger one or what sort of projects and first I came here and was just kind of blown away by the size that there’s just lots of little projects hidden in every little alley. Every little nook and cranny of this beautiful building, that’s behind me the. What really stood out to me as a big difference is that the more i talk to people there’s definitely a natural assumption that everything here is open source, which is just for me. As a fan of open source projects, it’s really great that there’s just that general expectation that it will all be open source and i want to make it to which was really exciting.
Obviously the bay area has that as well, but i felt that even more out here, there’s real dry for that open source. We make this for each other share and share alike sort of mentality. Another thing that really just in general has stood out to me is a lot of the kind of different crafts that are represented here when in one of the area’s underneath the back inside the building, there’s a large fashion section. Obviously, there was a fashion show that took place here with lots of blinky light up dresses on Thursday night, but there’s a whole section of people, 3d, printing jewelry – that just that fashion element that obviously Italy has is really kind of playing in.
And I really like that overlap of the the juxtaposition between art and the engineering side. If you can make it to maker faire Rome absolutely do it. It’S a great experience that it’s it’s amazing to see it living in the bay area in Silicon Valley. It’S very easy to think that, oh, it’s just this little area of the world, that’s really big into making things and having all these creative engineers coming up with crazy ideas. Then I come here and I’m like no. This is worldwide. This is not just some little like island that we’re floating on out in San Francisco. So absolutely it’s awesome to see this kind of spreading like wildfire as makers across the world or finding their niche and finding a way to flourish. .