When the White House Put Makers on the Lawn

In June the White House held its first Maker Faire on the South Lawn. Soldering irons, 3D printers, robots, kids, and a few cabinet secretaries sharing the same grass. Obama’s line from the day stuck with me: today’s D.I.Y. is tomorrow’s made in America. For once it didn’t sound like a slogan. It sounded like someone had noticed that the people building things in garages and makerspaces were doing work the country actually needed.

I wasn’t on the lawn as a Fellow. That starts in September, at the National Archives. But I was already living in that world. A few weeks earlier we’d put DiceBot online, a 1920s dice roller wired to a Raspberry Pi that answered tweets by spinning the dice, photographing the result, and reading the pips with OpenCV. Gizmag, Hackaday, CNET, and Adafruit all wrote it up. None of them cared that it was useless. That was the point. It was a physical object you could talk to, and people wanted to talk to it.

What the Maker Faire made visible was that government had started treating that instinct as policy, not hobby. The Office of Science and Technology Policy put maker culture next to the formal machinery of the state and asked what happened. The tools on that lawn were the same tools sitting on my bench. The difference was whether anyone in power thought the people using them were worth inviting inside.

They did, that summer. I’m still not sure how often that happens.