Fablab Open House 24 Hours Late, But Awesome Nonetheless

Early last Saturday morning I ran into Andy Trivett, the Adama of the nascent Fablab at the University of PEI, at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market.

“Are you coming to our open house?”, Andy asked.

“What open house?”, I replied.

“We’re having an open house for the Fablab on Tuesday afternoon, you should come!”, he exclaimed.

Reasoning that this was an event that deserved the full-on Hacker in Residence publicity machine behind it, I jumped into action. I created a Facebook Event. I tweeted about it. I even created an event on the UPEI events calendar.

For Wednesday.

And so I showed up on Wednesday for the open house.

“I’m here for the open house!”, I declared to the single person – an engineering student – present in the lab.

“Uh, that was yesterday,” he told me.

Oh.

Somehow I ended up publicizing an event 24 hours later than it was scheduled for.

Fortunately, people showed up!

So, in true Fablab hacker spirit, I soldiered on and had my own exclusive Fablab open house.

And, better yet, every single person who showed up, save Oliver, was a woman, which defeated the “only men use Fablabs” stereotype. What’s more, they were all curious and had lots of questions and obvious use-cases for the Fablab. They were the kind of people that Fablabs exist for.

So while I may have been 24 hours late to the party, the after-party that I held in its wake was, to my mind, a success. Apologies to all those who showed up who had to make do with my “making it up as I go along” approach to teaching about the Fablab; I hope I got most of the broad strikes right, and I hope you come back!