This was my first time at the ohsummit. The day was filled with great quality talks from speakers of all disciplines.
I first want to thanks Alicia and Ayah, the organizers for their great work. Everything was planned with details and efficiency.
The day had a great start with the presentation from Eric Wihelm, founder of Instructables. He demonstrated the power of kids creativity by presenting kids projects using Kinect blocks. These young members of the Instructable community have designed, built and improve Kinect guns, ranging from the pistol to the machine gun.
All the legal stuff has been packed in the morning sessions so that the afternoon talks were much more practical and, from my point of view, more interesting.
Gabrilla Levine presented a sailboat drone intended to clean up oil spills in water. The talk was loaded with project management experiences and tips.
Zach Liberman presented an earth touching talk about a device that allowed a paralyzed artist to make painting for the first time in years.
A few talks later, Bre Pettis talked about the creativity of the Thingiverse members by showing the evolution of some fun prints. The gangsta man transformed into a gangsta rabbit, a rabbit with a Colbert head, etc.
There were lots of other talks in the afternoon. I loved the presentation by the Lasersaur team. They managed, with very little fabrication skills, to build a fully functional four by two feet laser cutter. Great project!
The last talk has been made by Mitch Altman, the inventor of the TV B Gone. That was a very inspiring presentation where he invited the audience to invest their time in project they love!
To close the day there was breakout sessions and demos of the attendees projects. Our breakout session was about how to build and maintain a collaborative community of makers. Three speakers presented their projects and the way they managed their respective open source project.
Passed 20h, Hugo and me took a cab with two other peoples to the Makerbot party at their headquarter in Brooklyn. I met with great quality peoples from all over the world. I discussed my stars tracker with three members of the Makerbot team.
Tomorrow is off and Saturday I’ll head to the Maker Fair!
