Last weekend – May 19 & 20 – was the weekend of the Maker Faire: “A two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement“, says the header of the website. The event is (yet) another idea of Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make Magazine, one of the main references for the Maker movement.
The movement is quite active also in Italy nowadays. “Make” and “Open” have been indubitably two of the key-words of the last Design Week in Milano; some weeks before another event celebrated in Rome the Maker movement: World Wide Rome – the Makers edition – with an outstanding line of speakers: Chris Anderson, Massimo Banzi and Dale Dougherty himself, among the others.
In this period we’re working hard on social media at DensityDesign, with a series of different projects. We decided to track the event in Rome, following the #makers12 hash-tag. We collected around 6.000 tweets in the 24 hours of March the 9th. Here is the visualization developed by Stefania Guerra (with a strong support from Michele Mauri and Matteo Azzi) as the very first exercise of her internship in our lab.
Apart from the official Twitter account of the event, @worldwiderome, Riccardo Luna/@riccardowired – the anchor of the event and former director of Wired magazine, Italian edition – and Chris Anderson/@chr1sa are the most cited speakers. Anderson, Dourgherty/@dalepd and Banzi/@mbanzi didn’t use Twitter during the event, at least not with the official hash-tag. Luca Perugini/@perugini has been the most productive Twitter user, as usual!
One of the tags most frequently associated to #makers12 is – you could guess it – #arduino. Arduino is certainly one of the innovation stories we should be proud of in Italy, and I’m very happy to see that Massimo Banzi will talk about it at TEDGlobal2012. The topic this year is, again, Radical Openness.
