Chloe and Vanessa here from the littleBits Community Team. We wanted to cordially invite you to something very special happening in just a few weeks. To celebrate and grow our community of bitSTARS, amazing makers and mentors around the world like yourselves we are launching a global program called #InventAnything.
The goal of the program is to create opportunities to empower everyone, regardless of age, gender, technical ability, or discipline, to reinvent their world using open hardware as a building block.
We are kickstarting #InventAnything with a grand online making festival called InventFest.
InventFest will "officially" open for signup on February 15 but we're reaching out early because we want to codesign our Festival with you. Together we will build, test and reflect upon activites + tools to grow community around littleBits.
InventFest is a 5 week-long program to help you bootstrap and maintain your local littleBits community. Each week you can expect:
- We'll pass along a few design contraints
- Example projects + support documentation
- Experts in the community that you can reach out and contact
- Design Critique / Questions
- How to Lead littleBits Groups
- Take your Weekly Invent and design a learning activity for a group
- Share your story from your face-to-face gathering
- Engage each other in issues surrounding technology and education
- Share a resource
On January 6th you'll receive an email that from us hostesses at InventFest beta. During each week of the beta test, we'll work on activities and then share during our weekly "FestUps" over UnHangout.
Please put these dates and times in your calendar now. We will send a follow-up dinner-party-invitation (though it will proabably look like a calendar invite!)
- 7:00 EST Tuesday January 6 2015: Welcome and How this Works
- 7:00 EST Tuesday January 13 2015: How to Design a Learning Activity
- 7:00 EST Tuesday January 20 2015: Building Your Community and Finding Your Crew
- 7:00 EST Tuesday January 27 2015: How to Host an Event
- 7:00 EST Tuesday February 3 2015: Exhibiting Work, Empowering Peers
We'll start each FestUp with an activity to help you craft awesome experiences for your local audience, share resources and build buzz around your events. It's going to be totally stellar.
- Reply to Chloe: "Yes I'm in!" (We're going pretty low-tech with the signup until the landing page gets launched).
- Make sure you have a littleBits makerhub account to show off your nifty projects.
- Register for Unhangout. We'll hold our weekly meetups virtually on this platform.
- Bookmark and register for Discourse. This will be our main communication "hub."
High Fives!! The BitSTAR team Chloe+ Vanessa, your hostesses for InventFest. We're so glad you're here :)