[sudo-discuss] Fwd: Calling All Makers for Maker Faire Bay Area 2016!

[Patrik D'haeseleer]

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 at labitat.dk> wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, Jan 9, 2016 at 4:46 PM, max b <maxb.personal at 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.
>
>
> --
> marc/juul
>
>
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