This is the blog of Ant Miller, senior research manager and dilettante geek at large at the BBC.
I wail moan and cuss about the challenges and fun to be found here.
These are my personal opinions, and not those of my employer. Or anyone else here for that matter.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Planning for the Maker Faire

As in plans to do some 'making'. As in come March the 14th/15th, O'ReillyUK will be hosting the first Maker Faire in these islands *. The Backstage and BBC R&D (yes, it's an aging site, new one due soon!) teams have decided this would be a really fantastically interesting thing to get involved in, so we are putting together a team at the moment to go along and "Make Stuff".

We're not absolutely sure what we'll make just yet. Inspiration is coming from the excellent videos from previous Faires, our own experience with Mashed and other big events, and the fact that this is in National Science and Engineering Week, in the bicentennial of Darwin's birth, at the Life centre .

We want to keep it "open", so pretty much anyone can have a go at doing at least part of what we do. We think environmental science and exploration is a good element (the Darwin/ Life thing). We'd like to use loads of great BBC content, and we also need to be in the spirit of Make, and have lots of noisy, messy, smelly breaking and mending and making and hammering and gluing etc. and we'll also be filming it too. As plans develop I'll post them here, and you may even see tweets from me as the cunning scheme comes together, but for now, watch this space!

Oh, and do let me know if you're going too- should be a hoot!

* There is actually a simultaneous event a lot like a Maker Faire in Glasgow called McMADSAT (great name) but O'Reilly can really only do one at once. being the lazy sods we are, our team are doing the one nearest, but we're really keen to hear how they do in Glasgow.

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