We’ve been accepted to exhibit at MF if we want the stand. Can someone get in touch with Sophie and see if she still wants to sort a Big Map? Is it still kicking around Nottinghack?
It would be good to get some updated flyers printed - @russ do we still have Jake’s design kicking around?
Update: Have bought coloured string, flag pins, and 1200 black/white pins.
Can someone bring an old laptop I can shove a rubbish webapp on to collect details of interested parties? Would like to avoid using sheets of paper again.
Sorry, I’m limited in the help I can provide with updating the map this year, mostly because I can’t get there until Saturday afternoon.
There are so many Hackspaces now that we probably can’t be comprehensive on the map anyway. So could we just get away with checking that the ones that are on there still exist and remove them if not? I’ll have a look at the files from when I printed the last lot of labels to see if there’s anything obviously wrong. If there are any on hackspace.org.uk that are missing, especially in the North East (I notice there’s a Teesside Hackspace that I don’t think was there before) I will try to print some new labels (if my printer still works). But they’ll have to wait until I get there to go on the map.
@barnoid No problem! My plan was actually to head to a print shop today and run off labels for each of the spaces on the list - I’d have done it at home but my printer just failed. Worst case I’ll do it tomorrow morning.
So this went quite well - we were in a much quieter area than usual (because we registered late), but that was actually beneficial as it meant we could have proper chats with interested parties.
We had a bit of a nightmare as we had to re-paper the map, and it turns out there are a LOT MORE spaces since the last time it was deployed. Photos of the absurd number of flags in the map to come.
Two people from a Scottish village discovered they both wanted to start a hackspace after filling in our form separately
We need to come up with a new thing to take to events for outreach
Other things:
It turns out that hackspaces are really bad at telling people what they are - we had many people get excited when they spoke to us, but were totally unaware that the Newcastle Makerspace stand was anything to do with a physical space - everybody focusses on the objects being exhibited and misses the space aspect. For me this really reinforced the need for outreach about hackspaces themselves.
We need more flyers.
We need flyers for all the other hackspaces. Especially the nearby ones.
While the map is lovely, it’s a massive pain to actually pin all the spaces on and set up. We really need to come up with something that can be easily transported & deployed for outreach at other events.
Pointing people at their nearest space is great, but it gets exhausting when you have to repeatedly explain what a space is so they know what they’re being pointed at. This time I attached a sign explaining what a space was and why the map was there, but we really need photos & video of spaces as a separate display (or an attached display) so we can show people what we’re talking about.
tl;dr: It went well, but we need a new exhibit for the next event we intend to do outreach at.
Oh! One more thing. I had multiple people say “but I don’t have a facebook account, how can I contact them” when we pointed them to their local space - we need to be telling spaces that they are limiting their scope by only existing on facebook.
Sorry you had to re-paper the map, sounds like a massive pain.
I’m happy to get involved in making a new “thing” - not sure what it should be though. Did you have any initial ideas?
Display can be done - the first time we had the map we also had a photo slideshow running off a Pi. Pimoroni even donated a VESA pibow for it, which I’m sure I still have in a box somewhere. I’ve almost certainly still got all the images that I went out to spaces for, but we will probably want to do that again (or set up some sort of online submisson for spaces to do it themselves)