Long Island Maker Opportunity
Dev published on 2015-03-12T16:01:40Z

We have been running "maker education" programs for many years, working with young people and adults interested in hands-on learning that relates to personal interests and entrepreneurial motivations. Over the span of the past decade, while building companies and developmental play products that have reached homes across the world, our team has always returned home to Long Island with the ambition to increase local opportunity for young people, families and aspiring entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship can sound like a high-minded word, and too often, is regarded as a domain that is inaccessible to everyday people, protected by networks that create leverage for their peers and guard against competition from ground-level disruptive ideas.

Conversely, the maker movement is an open collaborative experience that is truly democratic in expression. It is marked by its inclusivity and hands-on nature, accessible by anyone who wants to learn and play and explore areas of opportunity touching art, science, engineering, technology and any other area that the mind can find reason to put its hands to.

In the maker movement, sharing skills and knowledge increases power, while in traditional business-as-usual ecosystems, this same sharing experience can be viewed as a threatening outcome, requiring the protection of legal documents, patent controls and heavy-handed copyright restrictions. Not so in the maker movement, where open source enthusiasts in both software and hardware areas of development willingly share their efforts to help build open opportunity.

This is a culture shift.

As leaders of the maker movement on Long Island, we invite you to participate and help us break down barriers that too often define the old way of doing business on Long Island. We invite educators to break through the walls that keep disciplines like engineering and computer science, biology and art separated by classifications that are being disrupted in the real world we now exist within everyday. Come experience what young people can do with access to advanced educational methods and learning resources, and help us build bridges to the future we all want to experience more of.

June 14th is an opportunity for all of Long Island... we hope to see you there.

@Dev

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The Original Maker Festival on Long Island

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