Alliance for Community Media Northeast Conference: Makerspace Panel

Last year, it was Jim Lescault who spoke about Makerspaces at the ACM-NE Annual Meeting. This year, it was my turn: yesterday, I facilitated a panel with speakers from three Makerspaces: Bryan Patton and Devra Sisitsky from MakerspaceCT, Christ Anderson from AS220, and Christine Olson from our own Makers at Amherst Media. It turned out pretty well.

I provided a brief introduction to the philosophical alignment of public-access television and the Maker movement. I drew heavily from the presentation I did for Science for the People, but turned down the Marxist rhetoric and focused more on community-building. At the same time, I wanted to puncture the hypothesis that a lot of people seem to have that "The Maker Movement Is Going To Save Us" and "The Maker Movement Is The New Economy". I felt a little bad when I realized that the team from MakerspaceCT was going to do this exact presentation right after mine. But I left my comments in because I think it's important.

The three presentations about Makerspaces were all very different from one another. Christine provided a very nuts-and-bolts look at our Makerspace, focusing on our sense that building the community was what was important, as opposed to installing some equipment in a room and calling it a "makerspace". It was a great introduction to what we're doing, what's working, who we're trying to partner with, and what our challenges are. I thought it was a fantastic model if another access station wanted to get started trying to build a Maker community. Neither of the others really had anything to do with access centers, but both were interesting for other reasons.

After the presentation, a woman congratulated me on the panel. I admitted that I thought it was a little incoherent because the different presentations were so uncoordinated and from totally different perspectives. She disagreed saying, "No! That's what made it useful: to see it from all these different points of view." I was very pleased and was glad to be a part.

Update: I posted again about the rest of the conference.