Maker Faire Bay Area Returns
makerfaire.com
makerfaire.com
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.
Mine was this (it did not become a billion dollar company): https://makezine.com/article/digital-fabrication/3d-printing...
I'll have to keep an eye on this for next year.
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.
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.
vs. individual cars/SUVs, or bus?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Library: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/noisebridge/yourlibrary
Book: https://www.librarything.com/work/33236/book/219759585
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.
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!)
For reference, it takes roughly an hour drive from SF going north to get to Vallejo.
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)
And I learned how to make bacon there!
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.