If you live in Los Angeles — Xeni and Mark will be speaking at the LA Futurists Salon at UCLA
Where/When: Our usual digs at Room 133, Kerckhoff Hall, UCLA this Friday, October 28th, from 8-11pm. Visit http://ucla.accelerating.org for maps and parking options.
Format: We’ll start promptly at 8pm with artcle sharing on the amazing things that have happened this last month (bring your cool stuff, we’ve got ours!) and then proceed to either a new book review (still no takers, email us interested), more discussion, or to a second opening speaker. Xeni will begin her talk shortly after 8pm and Mark will begin his talk around 9 to 9:15pm.Title: Maker 2.0: Global Do-it-Yourselfing, Bottom-Up Collaborating, a Maker’s Bill of Rights, and World Lessons in Top-Down Catastrophes
Abstract: How hacking- or “maker” friendly can we make our world? How many of the products that you buy are designed to be tinkered, customized, and modded by you as a consumer? How important is it for you to live in a world where your tools and technologies can be molded collaboratively by users to their own needs? How important do you think this maker capability is in emerging nations who have access only to our earlier-generation, hand-me-down technologies?
“I’m going to talk about my experiences as a how-to magazine editor, a self publisher, blogger, and author of books on the importance of making things and the do it yourself culture. We’ll discuss examples of maker-friendly technology, consider the arguments for a Maker’s Bill of Rights (Google: Crafter Manifesto), and outline inspiring examples of DIY projects built literally from junkyard parts in Cuba and other capital-constrained nations. As Internet 2.0 (broadband, etc.) and Web 2.0 (rich web, social networks, bottom up communities, etc.) increasingly emerge around the planet in the coming decades, scores of clever, resource-limited kids all over the world will be able to demand a whole new level of maker culture. We can tentatively call this Maker 2.0. Let’s begin the discussion on what that might look like and why it might be critical to a better future. To get an understanding of some of the challenges ahead we will also look at a few global lessons in top-down catastrophe from my new book, The World’s Worst. That should give us a sense of how far we have to go in some places, and why it is important to keep working toward a more bottom up, creative, collaborative world.”
Bio: Mark Frauenfelder is editor-in-chief of Make (http://makezine.com/), O’Reilly’s new magazine on the collaborative do-it-yourself lifestyle. He is also co-editor of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (http://boingboing.net/). Mark is a former Playboy columnist and editor at Wired magazine, author of Mad Professor: How to Concoct Extremely Weird Science Projects, 2002 and his newest, The World’s Worst: A Guide To The Most Disgusting Hideous; Inept, And Dangerous People, Places, And Things On Earth, 2005.
As usual, a number of us will go to Westwood to nosh afterward. Hope you can join us!