The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge
element14—an electronics component distributor, headquartered in the United States—needed help increasing community registrations and engagement with their global audience.
As Creative Director, I led the research process which uncovered the growing movement of Hackerspaces. These are collectives of engineers, programmers, welders, mechanics and makers. We tapped into this worldwide community to create The Great Global Hackerspace Challenge. 28 Hackerspaces from around the world were engaged in a friendly competition to create, hack or mod something that will have a positive impact on education. Each team was required to use a microcontroller and a portable power supply in their creation along with a $900 stipend to fund additional parts and materials.
We recruited a team of Hackerspace celebrities to evaluate the teams’ submissions at the end of their 2-month build phase. Three semi-finalists were selected and flown to Maker Faire in Silicon Valley, where they presented their creations live to our panel of judges.
We nearly tripled the number of Hackerspace teams that element14 hoped to engage with and produced over 100 posts on the element14 community website tracking the progress of the teams. The final presentations and award ceremony took place in front of a standing room only crowd and helped element14 take home an Editor’s Choice award from Maker Faire.