Grand Opening Planning

Legal and Other

• Will we need an event permit or other legal permission to host the event? Research needed.

Date and Time

• Date set as September 29
• Time not set.
  • We are planning to serve food. Should we start with food, then do presentations?
  • Alternatively, we could have one half of our talks first, break for food, then have the second part of our talks.
  • Either case, should we do around lunchtime? or around dinner?

Menu

• Grilling burgers and dogs for quick/easy production
• Need some vegetarian/celiac friendly options

Events

We had tons of great brainstorming about events. We had thought of having about 6 twenty minutes talks. That would leave about 10 minutes for Q&A, presentation switch over, etc. That would be about 3 hours of presentation, and roughly an hour break for food. We really like the idea of letting people make/participate as much as possible. Best case ideas let people do things in the space. The next best thing would be to give people project instructions that they can take home. A fantastic idea was to connect our short presentations to a longer event already scheduled at one of our public meetings. We give them a tease, then encourage them to come back by showing them that the full presentation is on the calendar. This should do a great job of helping to bring people back to the space.

Ideas for potential 20 minute presentations/teasers

• An Arduino-based presentation that would show some of the projects our members have already completed with Arduinos as well as show some great Arduino projects we know about on the internet. We would need someone to volunteer to develop/lead this seminar.
  • I could get my PID controller demo put back together as a live demo.
  • We should schedule another "Getting started with Arduino" class for later in the year to refer this session to.
  • Maybe include other boards like the makey-makey.
• A raspberry pi presentation. We would need someone with a raspi to take point on this one and develop this talk.
  • Ideally, we could develop this into a longer presentation to put on the calendar to let us dig in deeper (and encourage attendees to return).
• A KMBI presentation. Adan has volunteered to lead/present this presentation.
  • Include a recap of the boat building process.
  • Perhaps have some sort of scale demo to show off part of the process.
  • Hopefully have another boat in the queue and invite attendees back to one of the working sessions.
• A presentation on dyeing cloth. I would volunteer to lead this presentation.
  • Show the process for making the acoustic panels.
  • Explain/demo the cloth dyeing process. It's possible that if I did this early enough that by the end the cloth would be rinsed well enough to hold up and show off.
  • Schedule a "Saturday Session" for a dyeing class to invite attendees back to.
• Have a session where we get people to assemble a cornhole board.
  • Perhaps also have a session or workstation set up to let people sew their own cornhole bags. Bonus points if we can set up a screen-printing item so that we can let people make cornhole bags and put the knox makers logo on them.
• A demo on robots. Perhaps we can reach out to the knox area robotics guys to do a presentation?

Ideas for potential all-day demos

• If the 3D printer is ready, have it be printing something as a demo.
• Have the vacuum forming equipment set up and prepared for kids to make a few masks.
  • Have Oct. 2 be a plaster mold making class, where we make some more molds to take to ATL MMF. Invite folks back for that.

Awesome stretch project ideas

• M.U.G.E.N. - James is going to look into the possibility of doing some green-screen work to get be able to put pictures of attendees into a 2-d fighting game. (edit 8:24, James: http://www.elecbyte.com/mugen It will take me awhile to figure this one out, after taking a closer look. I doubt I'd have anything by the Grand Opening. If anyone has experience with M.U.G.E.N. or similar, though..)
• DIY Air-hockey table - Mike is going to look into the feasibility of a DIY air hockey table.
• Rubens Tube - Issac is going to bring a Rubens tube to see if we can get it working safely enough to set up as a possible demo. Use the function generators to show some awesome waves.

Publicity

We didn't do quite as much brainstorming here, but here is what we have:

Flyers

Issac/James were going to look at making some drafts to review at the next session. Feel free to contact them if you're interested in helping.

• A flyer to advertise the Grand Opening Event itself.
  • It should give some indication of who we are, what hackerspaces are about, and indicate the sessions we have planned.
  • Format: perhaps it should be bigger than 8.5x11
• Event flyers to hand out at the presentations/teasers to advertise the full meeting event tied to the presentation
  • Each of these event level flyers should have a small box with our full planned calendar with other events. (This means planning out the calendar for the next few months in advance)

Advertising

• We need to at least be in the free events calendars in the local papers:
  • Metropulse
  • Sentinel
  • Oak Ridger?
• We need to prepare an article for makerspace happenings and/or make blog. Example: http://blog.makezine.com/2012/08/22/port-city-makerspace-grand-opening/
• We should try to reach out and make contact with Metropulse to see if we can interest them in a story on the maker movement and/or our space.
• We should reach out to other groups that might have a collection of nerdy types:
  • Entrepreneurs of Knoxville (Originally the guys who wanted a techshop in knoxville)
  • Knox Area Robotics Club