This weekend, parallel to the World Maker Faire in New York, two similar events are taking place in Europe. In Berlin, Germany, over 900 makers at more than 200 booths will exhibit to an expected audience of 15,000 visitors. The other event takes place in Santiago de Compostela, in the Galician Region of Spain.
Maker Faires are part of the maker movement, a subculture were do-it-yourself (DIY), hacking, engineering, the arts and craftsmanship meet. Makers create technical devices, tinker with technology, and design works of art, often all at the same time. Since most of their productions are published as open hardware, and these can be reused and built on by others, the movement is also referred to as do-it-with-others (DIWO).
Innovation
Makers mostly use very affordable and accessible tools like Arduino embedded systems, 3D printers, CNC machines for working metal and wood, laser cutters, and open-source software, combined with online services for manufacturing prototypes.
The maker movement has been described as a counterculture against the neoliberal world of mass production, commoditisation and consumerism, as well as the democratisation of technology, manufacturing and innovation. The latter is why civil society, business, education and government often find each other in organising maker faires and hackathons, and setting up maker spaces and fab labs. To many cities, for example, facilitating these kinds of events and communities is part of their strategy for bringing in innovation or their ambitions of becoming a technology hub.
Make
Maker Faires are organised by Maker Media, publisher of Make magazine and a subsidiary of O'Reilly Media, traditionally known for its books on open systems, i.e. Unix and internet technology.
More Maker Faires — several of which take place almost every week somewhere around the world — can be found here.
