We do usually collect 50-100 new email addresses for our mailing list, and there are always several people who discover us for the first time at the Maker Faire and then start coming to some of our events. And yes, that's true even for CCL. I think the fact that the MF is in San Mateo really doesn't matter that much - visitors come from all over the Bay Area, including a very substantial number from the East Bay.

The number of kids at the San Mateo Maker Faire has definitely grown in recent years, but the main expo hall we've been in is still mainly aimed at adult makers, hackers, engineers, scientists, tinkerers, crafters etc. Last year we were adjacent to some scientists from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the NoiseBridge booth, and the big Game of Drones arena; and I think the public we were getting was fairly well respresentative of those kinds of topics.

In the past we've also gotten some good press coverage from being at Maker Faire, maybe when DIYbio was still a bit more of a novelty.

Staffing a booth at MF is definitely not for everyone, but I do enjoy it. I also love wandering around the MF, and I always encounter tons of other people that do stuff that is relevant to me. Last year that included two other bioprinter efforts, some cool modular DIYable microfluidics, several bioreactors, and more.

Patrik

On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 5:43 PM, Marc Juul <juul@labitat.dk> wrote:


On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 4:46 PM, max b <maxb.personal@gmail.com> wrote:
I might apply for our own table as sudomesh/peoplesopen.net, but I'm not 100% sure just yet. We need some more exposure to wealthy bay area nerds and it seems like probably a good spot for it. If sudoroom doesn't have enough people to staff their own table, we could see about going in 50-50...

I personally don't think it's worth the effort to staff a table there. It's a ton of people looking to be entertained or looking for somewhere to drop their kids for the summer. The amount of effort that goes into it vs. the number of people who will actually give anything back (by becoming members or similar) makes it a not so good deal. If you don't offer anything for sale or anything for kids then the only thing you can really hope to gain is an increase in the number of people who have heard about you. If we were located in the south bay I might feel differently since there is a chance of gaining members, but last time the only thing I got out of all of the conversations (I was there for only one day) was a donation of a broken pcr machine (that we did fix though) and a bit of advice on growing yeast. That was not quite worth a long exhausting day of talking to people + the commute. The only reason it makes sense for CCL is that we share a booth with BioCurious and hopefully they get more out of it.


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marc/juul