March Update

[Georgia]

Ok here's a list of what I've been doing for the past month since our last organizer meeting.

Last Friday I met with Evan and Dan at NextFab/Breadboard. With NextFab2 opening in the summer they are looking to get other activities happening in their Market Street space. We started talking about how to combine our efforts to plan and promote events and do fundraising. My next step is to get them a business plan with a narrative, budget, and list of equipment we'd like to keep in the space to use (could be laser cutter, band saw, computers, etc).

We've been invited to lead a workshop or talk at a Women in Tech Summit at Wharton in April: http://www.phillywomenintech.com/2012splash/
I emailed Leslie, Sarah, and Steph to discuss what we could do.

Our studio tour of draft works is up - 4 tickets sold already! It's scheduled for April 5.

Yasmin Kafai wrote us into her grant dealing with e-crafting circles. The grant will provide instructor fees and materials for us to hold workshops related to soft circuits, and then we will design a project individuals can do and then combine into a larger finished product - similar to a quilt with squares made by individuals.

We've submitted the event with Bluecadet, it's on the website, should be interesting: http://www.thehacktory.org/?page_id=9

I've been invited to be on a panel at the Grassroots Game Conference for Tech week on April 23, talking about the use of a kinect for non-game related projects, which we did for PAFA.

PAFA - the After Dark event was a huge success, Monica was really happy, and participants had a great time with our installations. I was invited by a woman involved in a community dev. corp in North Philly to bring the kinect project there for kids to play with. I emailed her, no reply yet.

A student at my program at UArts has organized an art show for hackerspaces. Deadline is April 6. He will be showing the work somewhere for Tech week, I'll post it on the blog but not sure I'll have time to submit anything.

We're making progress on the Philly Maker Kit, met last Friday at Brad's studio. We've had trouble meeting deliverables, so we're switching to doing work sessions. Next one is next Wednesday at Hive76. Now aiming to have the kits available in September (for Makerfaire).

I've started working with Mike Hogan from Hive on a class where we salvage a common part from a computer or other appliance, and then brainstorm how to use it in a new application.

I didn't promote our last soft circuit day as well as the first, but Tim from the PAFA project came, and the UArts student I mentioned, Andrew came, and a volunteer from NTR stopped in and was interested in coming back.