Building a makers’community in SKG

In Thessaloniki we are proud to support a vibrant startup community around the OK!Thess incubator. But it didn’t happen overnight. We are now in our 4th year of running our program and we are still finding new angles.

Most importantly though, we are heavily investing in bringing people together via masterclasses, meetups and other common activities infusing their interest and facilitating serendipitous interactions that more often than not lead to collaborative efforts.

Here are some of our input to the “Pop-Machina-a circular maker community” excercise fromlast week:

This is what we thought of doing with our makers community, which thus far has been largely disorganised and its “members” dispersed. So, yesterday on the 1st of July we had our first ever SKG Makers Meetup! It was online, which is what makers hate, but then again 30+ people gathered in total and we had some very fruitful discussions.

A couple of things that were mentioned by makers reminded me of the talk we last week with Marion. She mentioned community projects and local challenges, something that we never entertained before as startups are solely business oriented. But, as it turns out makers are all for challenges. They considered that challenges will bring more makers together and potentially lead to solving some of our neighbourhoods’ issues, whether it is artwork to brighten up the place or repair work for communal spaces or even new never before considered solutions to local shortcomings.

Now our efforts are focused on driving making as well as entrepreneurship, but it seems, as Marion said, that makers need problems they can solve now, goals that are tangible. Besides as she also mentioned when questioned by our little gang, some makers eventually consider turning their creations into a business at some point so solving local problems could be a great stepping stone.

One final thing that comes to mind and we definitely have to consider is to avoid clashes about Intellectual Property Rights (IPs for short). We need to be vigilant to make sure our makers feel comfortable working with others and open enough to collaborate.

There you have it. Facilitate, challenge and create a circle of trust were my key takeaways from the assignment and Marion’s presentation. We’ll definitely be swing it at times, but having in mind these directives could very well lead us to building a thriving community in the end.

Catch you later gang!