Maker Faire has a really special place in my heart. In 2011 I ran the iFixit booth where we not only ran phone repair workshops, but we also did a teardown of a car...live. A volunteer was kind enough to lend us his VW Golf, which he was also going to need to drive to work the following Monday. We were the last exhibitors out as it took us until around 2AM on Monday morning to get the whole thing back together and drive it out. We got two Editor's Choice awards and the Education award that year. One of the best weekends of my life.
Sadly, we never got to do anything like that again. Over the next couple years, large corporate sponsors started taking up more and more space until most of the main hall was just a bunch of ads. We were never able to get a space to do anything like that ever again. I really hope that the return of Maker Faire is also the return of makers at Maker Faire.
That’s the same year I exhibited the first time, and agree it might have been the pinnacle as an event for makers and hackers before it went corporate. I remember being disconcerted that the two person startup in the booth diagonal from mine was showing a closed source project, because it felt so out of place (they are now a billion dollar publicly traded company).
There's another maker event in the bay area called Open Sauce, newly created by William Osman (Maker & YouTuber). I think Maker Faire being cancelled for the last few years was a large motivator for this event. The event is this coming weekend, July 15-16, though it appears to be sold out already. https://opensauce.live/agenda/
That's uh... an unusual choice of locations. HOWEVER, you can take the Ferry from SF to Mare Island https://sanfranciscobayferry.com/
Two weekends is another interesting choice. There are going to be a lot of people, I suspect, who don't want/can't to setup or leave their setups for 2 weekends in a row.
But I'm totally excited, and thrilled it's going to be in 3 months and not an announcement of something next year.
> don't want/can't to setup or leave their setups for 2 weekends in a row.
It sounded like they were short on space, so wanted just half the makers each weekend.
From an email they sent:
> We plan to organize different groups of makers for each weekend.
> Mare Island is a beautiful, historic location on the waterfront where makers can be indoors or outdoors. This venue is smaller in size than the San Mateo Fairgrounds, where we’ve previously held Maker Faire Bay Area. It will limit the number of makers exhibiting as well as the number of attendees per day. That’s one reason why we decided to run over two weekends. At this new location, Maker Faire Bay Area will be less crowded and a more enjoyable experience for families.
Ah. Makes total sense. Shall be interesting and exciting to see how it goes. Hopefully they can get a good set of makers to exhibit. With only three months notice I wonder how many people will be available, especially those whom might be coming from farther away.
I'm glad to know that the ferry exists, and it does look like that it's common for them to offer special event service. My main gripe though is that the special event fare is rather steep for what it is ($36.50 round trip). Sure beats driving up there, but I'd almost certainly be weighing other interesting things to do for that price.
The city are in the process of slowly transitioning the ferries to electric (battery powered and hydrogen fuel cell, based on distance). I believe that there's already a fuel cell ship in limited service.
I learned about it by attending the port of SF public meetings where they've recently been discussing the Sea Change Ferry, the first hydrogen fuel cell powered public ferry in the world that they will be starting service with soon. It's so cool, they've designed a floating fuel barge that takes power from the Port side power connections they have that get their power directly from hydroelectric sources. The fuel barge takes that clean electricity and disassociates bay water to generate the hydrogen to power the ferry. The ferry then stops by every so often and picks up more hydrogen.
anyway, in those meetings they've casually dropped "everyone knows that the existing ferries ate worse than driving" like it's common knowledge among the SF port folks. I'm sure they did a study on it that we can find but my 2 cents is that it doesn't really matter if they look better on paper when full or not, etc. What matters is the empirical average, we have the data. Co2 emissions per passenger mile is the metric that matters and what I'm assuming they used to make the comparison. That way the specifics of the ferry or the car, and their loading don't get factored in.
It would be interesting to see if that calculation was with average ferry load, and if there's is any tip over with some reasonable increase in ridership. During rush hour the ferries are packed already, but I find that people in the US leave the car at home only as a last resort.
I'm also thinking that when assessing regional impact of transportation the analysis should be end to end: if a ferry is slightly worse, but then you arrive and are walking around or taking an electric bus/tram, then on the whole it might be lower emissions for that one trip than driving, with the additional external benefit of one less car in an urban environment (fewer harmful particulates, fewer cars around which afford us to reshape public space to give more space to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport, less noise, lower chances of collisions, etc). If people within a city are using PT, and 5% come into the city by ferry, does that provide a benefit in terms of CO2 emissions compared to the status quo? I would be surprised if it didn't, but of course don't have numbers in either direction.
Maybe, if I’m traveling with more than one person it might make more sense to drive.
They have a weekend promo for $5 per leg for addition round trip tickets on weekend that might be more worth while, however. The transit center is next to the ferry stop so I’m guessing it will be easy to get to Maker Faire from that area.
Yeah. It was really rough to see how Maker Faire declined as time went on. I attended from 2009-2015 and corporate sponsored space consistently grew every year. The venue never got bigger, it just pushed out...makers.
I feel like the whole "Make" brand/site/magazine/everything transitioned too much from Hacker to Hipster. As another comment pointed out, it become more craft-y, almost like "tech crafts". Probably a larger audience there, but I feel like today's Make is a bit far off from the original.
Something very specific that's been on my mind for years:
I used to occasionally go to a hacker space in SF called Noisebridge. They had a couple textbooks there, but one was this insanely cool almanac of various circuits that can be used to create different devices.
On the off chance that someone here goes to that hacker space or knows what I'm talking about, I'd be thrilled to know the name of that textbook.
There's a terminal at Mare Island, and according to the weekend schedule 3 of the 8 daily trips to Vallejo also go to Mare Island, and 3 of the 8 daily trips to San Francisco also go from Mare Island. If it's big enough maybe they can make special arrangements for it. https://sanfranciscobayferry.com/vallejo-ferry-route
Edit: it would be necessary to make arrangements because the weekend trips are for getting from Mare Island to San Francisco, not the other way around. They should be able to adjust their schedule but I don't know if they will.
Favorite Dale story: I had a booth at the first Maker Faire. As things were closing down on the last night, I was waiting at the front gate for a taxi back to the hotel. Dale saw me, and with no idea of if I was a presenter or an attendee, and no idea of where I was going, offered to drive me wherever I needed to go. Just pure awesome.
I've got many fond memories of Maker Faire, so I'm glad it exists at all. Odd location, but I'm sure they can take what they can get.
I wonder what caused them not to choose San Mateo anymore. Could have been intentional on their part, or the city/fairgrounds didn't want to serve their needs (and if so, too bad!)
Maker Faire hearkened back to computing when it was dominated by enthusiasts. And in much the same way it became commercialized, losing its spirit. I hope the new Make Faire is a reboot rather than a continuation!
It's honestly nice that such a relic of 2010s geekdom is making a return (yes, I know it started in the aughts, but I'm associating it with the 2010s).
Although Vallejo is considered to be part of the Bay Area, I would call it a stretch since it is pretty far up north, beyond SF, Walnut Creek, and Concord.
For reference, it takes roughly an hour drive from SF going north to get to Vallejo.
Yeah it’s in that that strange set of locations that’s “technically bay AREA but not BAY area”. Like Pittsburgh or Brentwood.
Tho it’s at least NEXT to the Bay proper, unlike those two, tho as it’s north bay it’s own niche subset that the North Bay (any further than San Pablo) gets put in.
Definitely still Bay Area but kind of like Sonoma is (most consider Sonoma “wine country” or “near Napa” than “the Bay” but it is in the Bay Area & Napa itself is also in that niche north bay subset too being next to a chunk of the Bay’s marshes)
"Bay Area" on Wikipedia redirects to San Francisco Bay Area, not a disambiguation page listing a bunch of different bay areas.
Not trying to say that Wikipedia defines culture or anything, but when searching for "bay area" on google, I have to go pages deep before finding anything about Tampa.
Sadly, we never got to do anything like that again. Over the next couple years, large corporate sponsors started taking up more and more space until most of the main hall was just a bunch of ads. We were never able to get a space to do anything like that ever again. I really hope that the return of Maker Faire is also the return of makers at Maker Faire.