Community Inventor days: Scaffolding grassroots innovation with maker events

Abstract

This paper describes a series of Inventor Days designed to catalyse sustainable relationships between communities and makers to support grassroots innovation. By appropriating core properties of hackathons, the Inventor Days brought together residents in a community and makers from across the city. Over three events, makers and community members worked together to learn about the local area, design novel ideas that addressed local issues and build prototypes. We show evidence that these events created enthusiasm around use of technology to support the community, while developing ongoing relationships that enabled members of the community to continue building on their experiences beyond the events. We propose this as a new means of enabling innovation in communities. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).