Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Travis Good: MakerCon New York 2014”.
I’M going to be talking about the mayor’s maker challenge, but without a clicker it’s going to be out of my memory. Okay, good got it! Thank you, okay! So when i introduced sabrina, i talked about how, in any given town, there might be makers. There might be maker groups, but they’re, not necessarily aware of one another, nor are they actively collaborating and the process of discovering one another getting familiar with each other and developing. Some trust can lead to collaboration and, as with this idea in mind that i was taking sabrina’s advice when i moved to san diego, where i found a bunch of makers and a few maker activities going on. But it wasn’t really very organized and i thought from what i’ve seen in other maker faires a maker fair brings everybody out of the woodwork and it’s a celebration of making.
So, let’s just have this happen in san diego, so we did on december 7th of last year. Have a maker faire on what was the rainiest day in the last three years still turned out great, because people were psyched, but that was a few months ago and if you are familiar with maker flair, layouts much like any other fair. This looks like a typical maker faire layout. You have a bunch of booths and you’ll notice in there that i have qualcomm and i have high tech high two examples of big sponsors and big participants, but in particular inside of that oval i did something very deliberate, which was, i put all sorts of local Making institutions side by side. The idea was, you guys exist.
You may be somewhat familiar with one another or oblivious of one another, but let’s have you spend eight hours next to one another something’s going to happen. These are the kinds of groups that i had there. Three different maker spaces, a traditional hardware, maker space, biospace, a fab lab library. The central library has a makerspace with 3d printers vinyl cutters, they teach classes on arduino on sorts, all sorts of things and importantly, the director reports to the mayor directly, which we’ll get to in a minute science museum, some schools, universities, even economic development and incubators. These guys were all set side by side. It was just a little scheme. I had let’s plop them down and get them talking.
Well, it was a theory based on just a life of experience, but when you get to know somebody, you tend to want to do things with them and within 90 days we did have 11 different collaborations come out of it, such as the makers becoming pop-up exhibitors. At balboa park on something called steam family day maker spaces, actively running programs inside of the library, the science museum planning maker events, these kinds of collaborations were the goal, and these kinds of collaborations wow that looks funny, doesn’t it these are all the players and they’re Supposed to show that they’re interconnected so by having they didn’t, become jumbled. Okay, they became interconnected, but uh. The stage was set for the mayor’s maker challenge and i’ll describe that to you now, but by having the stage that what i mean is a lot of players in san diego now knew one another.
A lot of a lot of players were willing to collaborate and a lot of players were interested in advancing the maker agenda. So the mayor’s maker challenge was tied to the the white house maker faire about two or three months in advance of the white house maker faire the mac manufacturing alliance of communities. It is not, it just does not flow off my tongue. I struggle every single time, but the manufacturing association of communities on behalf of the white house, sort of reached out with an agenda of 10 challenges and they were trying to solicit mayors to sign up for these challenges and, amazingly when they ended up doing the um.
When they ended up getting it out there of these things, many mayors, as you see at the very bottom, there were over 90 on the day of uh maker faire announced as having signed up for some of these challenges. Now i want to spend just a second on these challenges and i want you to look not only from your selfish perspective, if you’re a library, if you’re a maker space, if you’re an edc, whatever look at it, also from other people’s perspective, because one point we’re Going to be making is that if you get a bunch of people with different perspectives to make this happen, then there are a lot of people who benefit so a maker roundtable. This is the idea of bringing together a bunch of governmental, private sector foundations, et cetera, individual businesses together to just say how do we make the situation better for making in this city having a maker faire well by all means right, sabrina have a maker faire, so Mayors can sign up to say we will have a maker faire. Have a maker liaison.
An economic development council didn’t necessarily have somebody who knew how to talk with makers or who was actively as a part of their jobs responsible for dealing with the makers in schools or incubators or whatever, but establish that in the edc. Get this help create new spaces. New maker spaces, wouldn’t that be fantastic if a mayor said yes, i want to have new spaces get created, because, if you’re a school or if you’re, a science museum or whatever this can help, you advance your making agenda continuing on a maker manual develop one for The city who, who are the key people? What are the key resources etc? Create a maker strategy for education, maker, business development maker business development in edc isn’t necessarily geared towards making life easier for a hardware innovator as an example, and yet they could change their rules and they could make it a whole lot easier so committing to changing the Rules to make business development easier in the edc figure out what best best practices are for making and get them communicated to uh throughout the community and also develop maker support inside of struggling neighborhoods. This, if you counted, i said ten, but if you counted there are only nine up there.
The tenth one was give me what you got if you’ve got another agenda item and you think it’s going to help with the maker challenge, then propose it and do it. So, as i said, the stage was set as a consequence of having had a maker faire because we had the beginnings of a maker ecosystem. Instead of a bunch of points of light. We had now people who were aware of one another and who were willing to work together and had been doing some collaborating by banding together and what i mean by that is by working together towards the objective.
In this case of getting the mayor of san diego. To say yes to the makers challenge, we were able to influence. I can’t say we were critical in the process.
I can say we were very much an influence in the process if qualcomm leans into the mayor’s office and says yeah. That looks really interesting like to see that happen. How can we help it’s going to be heard if the two or three direct reports that we happen to know that work for the mayor lean in and say you know, we in the library, for instance, think this is a great idea.
We’Ve done making programs would like to do more in the future. It has an effect, and so it’s also a hot topic. There’S never been a hotter year for maker faire than when you had a 135 on the agenda coming up and you had one in the white house.
I mean this is just a big year for making, so mayors are aware of it where they might not have otherwise been aware. Sometimes it’s an easy political win. If in westport you’re going to do a mini maker, faire, anyways and the mayor says yeah i’ll make a maker faire and you do it, you make it happen.
It’S not a difficult thing to say yes to also because it’s a national program, there’s opportunities for national visibility, so the stage was set in many ways in terms of our being locally ready and in terms of the environment, that is to say making being hot. And this program being available, so what did we accomplish then? And we, the people i work with – were only a contributing factor in this, but what did we accomplish? Unbelievably nine of the ten items were bought into by the mayor of san diego. Now it’s only eight that you saw listed because they took on the tenth challenge as well and they said what we want to do is when it comes to bio and medical hardware, hacking. We want to change the rules for foreign direct investment in san diego. Now that may not mean anything to you, but that’s just an example of being creative and coming up with something was very specific to san diego and something that was going to help an important part of our economy there. So there were nine of the 10 challenges accepted.
The maker’s core team has been identified. I went back and forth whether to mention this or not, because it sounds proud, but i am on that team and i’m very happy to be able to make this contribution. We’Re supposed to be getting together in the next week or two, which means that it didn’t happen immediately after june 19.. It’S taken a while. We need to figure out a way of pushing this thing forward, so that was just in san diego, but there were a hundred cities. I think more at this point 105 or something i can’t remember what the number is, but it continues to grow because the door is still open and i’m going to read you some examples from a report that was produced, but that arrow tells me to go to The next, because i want you to look at these urls and if you’ve got a picture, take a picture if you want to write it down.
These are the two key documents. I recommend, if you’re interested in advancing this, so the first one describes the makers challenge. The second one is the action report and it’s the action report that i want to read to you some examples of so in each of those 10 categories. Let me just tell you that when it came to best practices, 24 communities will convene diverse stakeholders to pull it together. Dayton, ohio has an example here. I won’t take the time when it comes to maker liaisons relatively easy thing for the mayor’s office to put in place right. Appoint somebody to be the maker liaison. 64 communities will designate a specific lead person in municipal government to be the liaison to the maker community.
In lansing michigan they’re appointing a making and manufacturing coordinator in the mayor’s office who will engage in the city’s economic development planning and workforce development teams to build partnerships with lansing makers, network community college and state university. We all love maker spaces right well, 45 communities of the 90 that were signing up at the time of this document, 45 communities will hold maker roundtables, which is in the maker spaces. That’S coming up, sorry about that. Louisville is doing some big conference of 25 mayors and a whole bunch of private sector and academic to maker faires 32 communities signed up.
Why isn’t that the full 90.? Each of you should get that number boosted go to your mayor, make that happen. Maker spaces 36 communities will create, expand or support maker spaces. Just one quick example: in madison wisconsin sector 67, a makerspace there was chosen to be a hub for entrepreneurialism in what’s a section of town called the starting block, it will provide additional co-working innovation and community space around sector 67 anchor and here’s the part i love Most, this effort will include making city-owned land available, funding the effort from the 2015 budget and assisting in private fundraising for that activity, and it goes on to talk about 12 communities doing maker manuals, 30 communities signing up for maker education and workforce strategies, 43 signing up For business development – and these are not small numbers – okay, we’ve got a bunch of mayors around the company country who are willing to say i’m stepping up and i’ll sign up for these challenges and the door is not closed.
The door is open, it’s opportunity for you, and i hope that if you have had a maker faire or if you have a maker ecosystem already in its nascent stage that you’ll see this is the second brand. You can leverage first, one being maker fair. Second, one being mayor’s maker challenge and i switch roles to introducing the next speaker, tim mcnulty, .