Round-up Makers Faire 2010

The following videos provides impressions of the Maker Faire and gives some Makers the chance to present their projects.

Maker Faire in the News, Media

Maker Faire Africa 2010 has already received some online and media coverage. Yesterday at the Faire itself we had K24 TV, Citizen TV, Emeka was on the radio and The Nation newspaper published an article. Online these articles have appeared, if you spot more please DM us @MakerFairAfrica

Video interviews with Makers and organisers by Ulrike Reinhard

Fast Company article – Gadgets dominate at Maker Faire Africa

Huffington Post article on Pat Delany

Kenya Standard article Kenyas innovation Fair kicks off

One World Netherlands article

Bike Uju blog post covering the Boda Boda makers

Popular Mechanics on Africa Tinkerers

and of course our Flickr set with loads of good images of Makers and events

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mak erfaireafrica/pool/

the Match a Maker website – www.matchamaker.info (this will be filled up in the coming few days)

Lamp made at the Faire in workshop

Emeka Okafor on Makers Faire 2010

Emeka Okafor is a venture catalyst and entrepreneur. He lives in New York City. He is the Maker Faire Africa curator.

Emeka is pointing out some very interesting facts on Makers Faire among others:

• create awareness for African innovation
• building a “productive class” whose foundation is laid on building problems solving systems
• celebrating existing knowledge Africa already has and connect it to knowledge outside
• building a community is a basis for business
• African makers focus on things for which there seems to be an immediate need (= market)
• the biggest market is the indigenous

Eric Hersman on Makers Faire2010

Eric Hersman, one of the organizers of Makers Faire 2010, talking about his learnings from last years event and what they are planning for this year.

After the first day I have to say that I love the spirit I have felt at the event. The same like last year … very vibrant community, expiriencing that they do have omething to give, to show and then – indeed – to celebrate!

Maker Steve Song on VillageTelco

Steve Song is founder of VillageTelco, based in South Africa and he is one of the makers at Makers Faire 2010.

A Village telco is a community based telephone network. It is based on a suite of open source applications that enable entrepreneurs to set up and operate a telephone service in a specific area or supporting the needs of a specific community [1].

The first village telco has been established by Dabba at Orange Farm, a township near Johannesburg, South Africa. Users can make free local calls to other Dabba subscribers, as well as use pay-as-you-go vouchers to make calls to ‘phones on other networks [2].

Technically, a village telco consists of:

• a mesh network made up of Wi-Fi mini-routers combined with an analogue telephone adaptor (aka ‘Mesh Potato’)
• SIP phones
• a pay-as-you-go billing and management system
• a SIP/VOIP server
• least cost routing equipment

These components together comprise an easy-to-use, standards-based, wireless, local, do-it-yourself, telephone company toolkit. The goal of bringing these together is to make local telephony in developing countries to be so cheap as to be virtually free. This has become possible thanks to advances in open source telephony software and the dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless broadband technology.

Solar powered street light system

At Makers Faire 2010 Joy Tang and I interviewed to Norbert Okec from Uganda on his prototype of a street light system ..

Meet the Makers

A sample of many of the ‘makers’ found at the 2010 Maker Faire Africa held in Nairobi.

MFA 2010

Maker Faire Africa 2010 has already started. Despite the morning chill, things are looking up.

Registration

Briefing on house keeping issues.

Sites have been set up and more are being done.

Create a full-scale machine shop

2009 MakerFaireAfrica participant Pat Delany of the MultiMachine fame presents “A full-scale machine shop” built along similar principles:

Kibera’s Victorious Youth Group

In a small self-built workshop at the edge of Kibera, one of Africa’s largest slums, a group of craftspeople, designers and artists create jewelry out of old butcher bones.  Employing 23 members full-time, Victorious trains and employs at-risk youth in bonecraft.  We are excited to have them joining us at Maker Faire Africa 2010.