I personally think this is due to the infantilization in part of a lot of media outlets, where the emphasis has been placed on getting the ideas into the most hands possible instead of folks who'd actually benefit. Focusing the faires around 3D printing geegaws and cosplay items is fine if you want to make numbers, but you get consumers and the followons, and not creators from that.
You can think of it in the same vein as Marvel movies or Harry Potter books - low content, low thinking media that raises insane amounts of money based on appealing to the mass market and the wannabe 'geek' crowd that doesn't tend to do much innovating except in consumption methods.
The trend of interesting innovation / culture / community starting as a movement and turning into a zoo (in the sense of people not part of it wanting to pay to have a look) is kind of how everything happens.
Settlements of humans that are now cities, gentrification within cities, hacker spaces and makerspaces ending up full of business people and less technical people...
I'm not saying this is a problem, although I know it's often sad when you're a part of the community, but that the cycle of interesting bits of culture kind of being absorbed and in some ways killed but in other ways captured into the world happen all the time.
It's really interesting to watch. I'm currently living in Amsterdam which is trying to reduce tourism (local politicians do things like remove the famous Amsterdam sign). I don't think it'll work. Too many people benefit from the money and the world wants a piece of it.
I think for some Brexit is a futile attempt at trying to hold on to British Club even though Britain will inevitably evolve and change with migration, technology, tourism, knowledge etc.
This seems like knee-jerk lit-snobbery. "It's popular and accessible, so it can't be any good."
John Finnemore: You are not a geek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thsRk9fuIdU
Reminds of open-source contributors doing it for the passion. People never made open-source software to make money back in the day...
More uniformity, more emphasis on unrelated consumer products like pre-prepared food offerings, less emphasis on interesting electronics kits. Maybe I became jaded, but maybe Maker Faire has tried to target a lower and lower common denominator in an effort to boost revenues.
One was a young girl teaching passerbys to sew a purse together using recycled jeans and fundraising for animal rescue missions.
The adjacent booth was to pay $15 for a "crystal therapy healing and ionic rebalancing" session.
Our last year there (somewhere around 2012), they had this fancy "sponsors only area" that had free food/beer/etc and took up a large amount of floor space (it was at least 20'x20') that otherwise could have gone to actual makers exhibits.
I think what happened is that they started chasing sponsors, when they should have been focusing on the makers, and vetting that the sponsors were doing something attendees would be interested in directly (eg: no large java booths).
I wonder if it would be financially tenable if they scale it down and get back that home grown feel. Then again the bay area is a very different place now.
How do the economics not work out here? 100-150K visitors/year, each dropping (on average? $20 for entrance ticket)?
Don't they require commercial presenters to pay for their space?
How much does it cost to rent the San Mateo Fairgrounds?
As a exhibitor myself, I've seen how the event has changed over the past few years, and the loss of sponsors such as Intel have definitely hit them. I just hope the event can continue, it's really the highlight of the school year for me and my peers.
Long ago it was full of grassroots makers showing off their DIY stuff but it quickly became a commercialized trade show targeting these folks and their audience as consumers instead of hosting them.
Or well, scaled back significantly in comparison to a decade ago.
The new nonprofit shop, Maker Nexus, is below critical mass. Only 50 or so paying members. (I tried to join, but their outsourced signup site can't send me a confirmation email. So I didn't join.)
What happened? The "maker movement" fad declined. Etsy changed their policies - you no longer have to make it yourself; you can outsource manufacturing. TechShop SF used to have six CNC laser cutters busy cranking out "handmade" crap for Etsy. That stopped. The rest of the place mostly turned out stuff for Burning Man. Rising rents forced shops out, of course.
TechShop tried to pivot to "STEM" or "STEAM" education. In practice this meant teaching middle schoolers to wire up Arduinos. That's fine, but a huge mismatch with the tools available at TechShop.
Autodesk's previous CEO, Carl Bass, thought 3D printing was going to be a big deal, and put money and software into TechShop. His successor decided that wasn't happening and pulled the plug.
It's been a long time since there were people building parts for X-Prize entries.
I don't think there's any public space in Silicon Valley which has everything you need for surface mount soldering. Which is embarrassing.
The SJ/SV and SF locations appear to be open recently looking at recent photos taken there and there’s recent posts by the owners on their Facebook pages.
[1]: http://www.halted.com/ [2]: http://www.excesssolutions.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category...
