[hackerspaces] Sigh -- I'm not helping with Maker Faires this year.

[Doug Philips]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 12:35 AM, Matt Joyce <matt at nycresistor.com> wrote:
> It's a personal decision.  And I respect Mitch's right to act based on
> his beliefs.  I don't agree with it myself, but I understand his
> position.

True that.
There is a deeper meta issue here (and perhaps this also has been
covered before), which is why are things so bound-up in that one
particular logo'd conference system? Makers aren't typically very
tolerant of being told what we can and can't do: Don't take that
apart, don't make it do something else, just sit and consume! It's
puzzling then to see that attitude here. Maker Faire defines how all
this works, and they've changed so I won't participate. Cool! Start
something else! But just do nothing means that the DoD wins, they're
in control, if you don't play their game, you don't play? Really?

So why not take the lessons learned and "reboot" Maker Faires? Is the
movement still so fragile that it would be treasonous to do so? Why
"wring your hands" over this instead of taking some more positive
action?

Surely there are more reasons than this one to support another venue.
Don't call your thing a MakerFaire and then you're not under that
poisoned umbrella.

I guess I'm just too idealistically naive to think that there has to
be just one way to do this and that one way can be so easily poisoned.
Sigh. Probably shouldn't be posting when I should be sleeping, so will
switch modes now. :)

-=Doug