© CC-BY-SA-3.0 Jon Davis
Next weekend (May 30 & 31) is the 4th Annual Bay Area Maker Faire. It will be taking place at the San Mateo County Expo Center starting at 10 AM on both Saturday and Sunday. For those that don’t know what Maker Faire is, read the following:
The World’s Largest DIY Festival. A two-day, family-friendly event to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, think, play and be inspired by celebrating arts, crafts, engineering, food, music, science and technology.
All I can say is that I went last year (for the first time) while volunteering at the Wikimedia Foundation booth; it was a ton of fun. There was all sorts of crazy stuff going on from bonsais, to robots, to fire breathing robots, to a human mouse trap and even RC boats that fired BBs at each other. I made one “quick” run around the property trying to take one picture of every booth and ended up with close to 500 pictures. I uploaded about 300 of them to Commons for everyone’s enjoyment.
© CC-BY-SA-3.0 Michel Deschênes
This year the Wikimedia Foundation is going to be there again! Of course that means we need volunteers. If you’re in the SF Bay Area and a Wikimedian, you should volunteer to help out at the booth. You can find more info about it on wikipedia or read about how you can help on Phoebe’s blog. I spent a good amount of time at the booth last year and it was very enjoyable. I got to meet a lot of interesting people and talk to a lot of end users to get their perspective. If worse comes to worse and you don’t want to volunteer (shame on you ^_^ ) you can at least stop by our booth. At this point in time, I have no idea where it’ll be other than probably in the main building. We’ll be easy to find though, look for the free content!
For anyone planning to attend Maker Faire. A word of advice, beware of traffic & parking. When you have 75,000+ people converging on the fair ground for the weekend, traffic is a mess. I saw backups all the way onto the freeway. So plan plenty of extra travel time. And if possible, I recommend travel by Motorcycle as parking is much easier with one of those.
