Maker party Kochi, is one of the largest webmaker party in the world, with more than 4K participants. Along with Abid Aboobacker and few friends we hosted it in Kochi, India on Sept 21, 2014. Maker Party Kochi or MPK was an unconference, people in Kerala were very new to unconference model at that time. It’s basically teaching stations, where people come and learn from the ‘makers’ sitting there. Anybody with knowledge in any technical or non technical skill can offer a station. People come to a station they find interesting and the teacher explains the technology and how it can be learnt. We had technical teaching stations like webmaker tools, Arduino, raspberry pi, Drupal etc and non technical ranging from origami to salsa dance ! There were 30 stations in total.
Mozilla Kerala
Mozilla Kerala is the Kerala wing of Mozilla. Mozilla primarily works on open web technologies and online privacy and security. Mozilla Kerala started in 2012 and has been active since then. I was part of this community for last 3 years.
Webmaker is Mozilla’s initiative to teach the nitty gritty of the web. This include building web, learning how the web works and and the different aspects of using internet. Mozilla also work for ensuring online privacy and security of web user.
CITTIC, CUSAT
CUSAT, Cochin University of Science and Technology is the one of the pioneer research universities in India. I did my bachelors from School of engineering, which is run by the university. The event happened when I was in my final year at CUSAT.
Centre for Innovation, Technology Transfer and Industrial Collaboration (CITTIC) is a university entity to support innovation and industrial collaboration. Dr P Abdulla is the present director of this body. He is a well known researcher in the country in the field of antennas. Apart from academics he is very curious about the technology growth and startups. I was working with him for the past couple of years to build an innovation culture within the students of our university. When he got a space for running a Technology Business Incubator ( TBI ) he gladly opened it for running community events there. The entire tinkerhub story starts from there. I believe a single professor like him can drive the entire community to new levels.
Un-conference
“ Where is the time schedule ? “, I guess this was the most asked question during the MPK. Actually there was no schedule, even for the talks. What we told the speakers was the “here are the people who are interested in tech, go and communicate them “ . So they sat down, started talking and as the progressed more and more interested people joined. In one of the sessions it started with 6 or 7 listeners and ended in a cool 100.
Learning stations
We had two kind of learning stations, technical and non technical. The philosophy behind the stations was, you will find something to learn from anyone you met. There were name boards for all stalls. One or two people sat at a table. They guided the learner in the things taught at their stall . Most of the times, the learner got to do a small workshop there. The learner group was between 2 to 10 depending on the subject and the size of the room. Learners moved on to other stations when they finished one. Some stations had fixed timings so that learners could register for the next session with the volunteers.
Exhibitions
Disruptive technologies like additive manufacturing, AR and VR came into the picture. Computing power became cheap with boards like raspberry pi. Electronics became doable by anyone with arduino. Most of the people weren’t really aware of the infinite possibilities that each of these technology brought. What we wanted was to make sure is everyone experienced the new technologies in their hand. We brought all new gadgets, devices equipments robots and technologies to a single venue so that people could use and feel the latest advancements in tech.
3D printers and quad copters were the main attraction. Most of the participants hadn’t even heard about these things before. The best thing that happened is that now we have couple of 3D printers in our hand, which were made by the participants of the event.
People
Teachers / Makers
We invited people to run learning stations. Geeks, professionals, masters and other interested people registered in our site. We invited communities like Wikipedia, Swathanthra Malayalam Computing ( SMC ), Google developers group to run the stations. There was around 40 people, to make it 50 we listed down the missing stations, found students who are beginners in specific fields. Assigned mentors for them to prepare them for running the stations. When we hit the target number, we asked teachers to take two or three students and train them so that the mentor could take some breaks in between the sessions. In total we had 120 people ready to run the stations in full fledge form.
Speakers
Mentors like Sijo Kuruvilla, Founding CEO of Startup Village joined the party to share his experiences. The session was basically on financial literacy and how we can exit from rat race by making passive incomes. Manisha Mohan, MIT Media lab research fellow talked about her journey as a young woman inventor from India. Other speakers were from different fields like internet security, healthcare and community building.
Learners
People from all across the nation came to Maker Party to celebrate making and learning on the web. Students, professors, professionals, families and schools kids came to learn something new. It was an amazing feeling when 6 year olds and 60 year olds showed the same curiosity to learn something new.
The Team
more than 200 people worked to make the event happen. it includes students of CUSAT, Mozilla volunteers, professors and other like minded people. Everyone played their role to perfection. The Mozillians helped in setting ups teaching stations while CUSATians took responsibility of the event managment part. It was a great experience for me also, working with such a large set of.people to achieve a common goal. We had a special after party with musicians from CUSAT for all the volunteers.
What we learned
Technology is simple, anyone can learn from internet
We needed to run 50 teaching stations at a time, for that we need 100 to 120 people. Getting that many people in such short time was a herculean task. Then we planned to make teachers out of the volunteers. Most of the volunteers were first years who are just joined the college. We wrote down the list of technologies that we needed visitors to learn about. Praveen who is a summer of code scholar took care of training the trainers. He introduced the basics of technologies to the trainers. it is like “this is raspberry pi, this bird can do anything that a normal computer can do. look it’s just credit card sized. Read about this and when tomorrow a university professor or a kid asks tell them how this can benefit them explain it well. That’s it “. He did the same for all the technical stations. He made groups, sat with them and their computers and phones. Googled about the technologies, read articles watched videos and made a ‘hello world’ program that evening. We still had 2 more days to go. Then the trainers went to each other to teach what they just learned. Everyone started to ask questions when they were not clear. In this way everyone improved their knowledge.
If we could learn so much tech in two days, imagine what could happen if we spent a month or two or couple of years. This is the one key learning we had even before the event started. This thought process eventually lead to the formation of the tinker hub community. It is a long story, I love this story more than my love story. I will tell you about it, maybe next time.
1. Thirst for knowledge and power of internet
We haven’t offered anything other than opportunity to learn technology. People traveled from far distances to attend the event. Before hosting the event, i met people, especially students who wanted to learn technology but not clear where to start from. Maker party was the easiest solution we had. In teaching stations what we did was not just teaching the technology, instead we showed that this can be learned by anyone. anyone with enough passion. You can’t make someone master in any technology overnight, but what you can do is give a route map for them. Tell them how you started, the tipping points and how you reached here. Many can relate one or another story and get inspired towards learning and making.
2. Need of a open learning space
We had power computing facility in our university, high end labs and equipments. What we and almost all colleges and institution missed was the access. Access to resources, access at convenient times and an environment to tinker and learn. I haven’t seen any inter branch collaboration. The overall thought process is like if you are in mechanical engineering you are not supposed to think about computers. If you are in electrical and still do programming, i’m sure you are an alien.
On a personal note, I tried to host couple of gatherings at my classroom after college time, basically to share the knowledge everyone have in different areas. I give up when i realised you won’t get any permission or just a projector for a informal gathering. there is nothing great that following the syllabus.
Then we searched for a space. At last we landed on CITTIC’s space, which we still using as our community space.
3. Tell them why we are doing this
One of the big challenge we had is the scale we are doing. None of us except abid had an experience of hosting an event these much large. we needed people to take care of things from event planning to guest interaction, publicity to crowd control and cleaning the place to decorations. We didn’t had any fund for this, so basically we needed volunteers for all of this. Since no body ever seen a unconference, it was hard for them to digest the event also.
What we did was, we asked people to come for a discussion. We talked about internet, why it is important and how you can help people to learn web and other technologies. Volunteers felt it, and they just made it happen. Many worked overnight, many had paints in their shirts, many didn’t get time to eat or sleep but they believe it’s their duty to help people learn. to learn about internet and to learn from internet. They volunteered for the cause they believe in, they did their best to make the event remarkable.
4. Positioning
The total crowd expectations was 3000 two days. In all earlier events we expect 500 and 100 will show up, it was the style. For maker party we needed to ensure the participation. Abid was mainly leading this part. We had 4374 attendees in total in two days. I was super excited, and still i can’t remember without goosebump . On discussing with this aspecting abid explained the importance of positioning. Positioning is something we are setting the standard for our self or programme or anything, If we are not confident about what we do, no one else will.Being a designer and a social media guy, abid positioned the event as the latest tech event in kerala and see where we reached. He made people curious, exciting and a must have experience. Positioning and communicating what we are doing is equally important as the doing doing.
This is something i still have to master.
Abid, the wizard
Abid is the guy who designed all the above. he left his high paying job at a leading tv channel for the same. took months to plan the things, and we all together made it happen. apart from all of these, he is the most selfless man i ever seen. he taught me the lessons of giving without expecting anything back. he never made counters. when we are working for maker party he was earning like 10 K by consultation, we used to live like kings till our pockets became empty, and with biscuits rest of the month. This is still happening even if his earning became 10 or 20 X today. He spend all he have for people and causes he cares.
We still works together couple of projects like tinkerhub and other community initiatives
