We’re pleased to announce that the call for Makers for the Mini Maker Faire Melbourne event is officially open!
We’re especially keen to receive submissions from Makers interested in:
- demonstrating or presenting things they have made.
- running workshops to show others how to make things or use tools.
- exhibiting products or services they can offer the community.
For those Maker’s who have already indicated their interest and have been waiting for the green light from us, we thank you for your patience and welcome you submissions.
Note also that we’ll be making the announcement of the venue and opening the ticket registration process tomorrow, Friday 16th December 2011.
Makers, please provide as much information as you can on the entry form to help us understand your requirements and to balance the event with a good range of projects. If you’d like to submit more than one proposal — for example, an exhibit table and a workshop or presentation — it would help us out if you could submit one entry form per proposal.
Please have a read of the content on the Maker page to better understand some of things we’re looking for from submissions.
If you aren’t sure about your submission, please feel free to ask questions on your submission, or drop us an email at: info (at) makerfairemelbourne (dot) com.
Melbourne Mini Maker Faire 
More than a month’s notice would’ve been much appreciated for us in other states.
Yes, the fact that we’ve been able to bring it all together so quickly has been amazing, but as you say the downside is it’s left us with limited time to get the message out to the broader community. Some of the factors that have delayed the official announcement weren’t really within our control. Still, we’re seeing good response locally in Melbourne, and have a number of folks from further afield planning to attend.
This Mini Maker Faire will be a relatively small first effort for us, with plenty of scope for running subsequent events. So if you can’t make it this time, we’d really welcome your contribution on the next one. Even though we’re focused now on the January 2012 event, please connect in on one of the media channels and we’ll let you know as soon as the next one kicks into gear.
That’s fair enough then.
Great! Can’t wait for the next one!
There is certainly enough interest thoughout Australia for a large Maker Faire.
Rod
Awesome!
But you couldn’t of picked a worse time of the year.
Everybody I know can’t go or is on holidays.
Feb or March would of been a better time to do it.
A bit of notice to get it out there eg 6 months otherwise people will not of heard of it and it will only be passers by.
I would of travelled from the West with a whole set of items if I heard of it earlier and wasn’t busy that weekend!
Hi Rod,
Thanks heaps for your Awesome support! 🙂
Yes, we recognise it’s not necessarily the best timing for everyone for a number of reasons, and certainly more notice would be better.
One of our main criteria for picking this date was that we had a great collection of makers and hackers already in Melbourne from all over Australia (and some from further away), attending the Arduino Mini Conference being held as part of the Linux Conference in Ballarat: LCA 2012. On the lists related to that event, we’ve been kicking around the organisation for quite a few months, however we only recently received the official approval from O’Reilly to use the Maker Faire brand.
We’re seeing this as a first “dip our toes” event: a smaller “v1.0 beta” production, but something to help build up to a larger event.
If you haven’t already, jump on the announce mailing list and stay tuned for subsequent events!