Indio Genius: The wonderful tinkerers and dreamers of Maker Fest Manila 2014

The thing about creativity is it always finds a way to express itself—whether it's tinkering around with 3D-printed doodads to make your very own self-writing machine, or a remote-controlled coffee machine that makes your espresso even while you’re still in bed, or an app to monetize your unlimited mobile data by reselling it.

Maker Fest Manila, supported by Mozilla’s Webmaker Project and held the weekend of September 13-14 at the Glorietta 5 Atrium, was pretty much a celebration of what Filipino storyteller Kidlat Tahimik might call “Indio Genius”: just sheer, unadulterated homegrown tinkering talent.

The commercial lights of the mall were a far cry from what must have been the open-air feel of the World’s Fair where Jules Verne himself found inspiration to write 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but the permeating vibe of excitement, in this writer’s imagination, would have been pretty much the same.
 

Maker Parties

The two-day event served as an exhibition of the diverse things you can do on the web, and it’s not just the usual hackerspace meetup.

Booths featured various web-based affiliations, from Filipino hobbyist developers like Unravel Games rolling out their Flappy Bird-inspired Egg Oh! mobile app, to KahelOS, a Filipino-made OS designed to straddle the line between user-friendliness and customizability. There were also the initiatives like JumpSparc, whose Internet-enabled coffee-maker plied caffeine to everyone interested in the Internet of Things, and the School of Data, which, partnered with Open Knowledge Philippines and Bantay.ph, aims to bring transparency and education to the Internet-using public.

Maker parties are usually celebrated around the globe from July 15 to September 15, and the Philippines celebrated the first of its size with Maker Festival Manila. Supported and inspired by the Mozilla Webmaker Project, Filipino creativity found its way to showcase just how much Filipinos are part of the global Internet culture.

^{Maker Festival Manila opened to a packed crowd.}
 

From consumers to producers

“We will be citizens of the web,” said Festival Director and Mozilla Community Manager Faye Tandog. “So we should be informed on how to form it and how to utilize it.”

“The Webmaker project is an educational campaign where we aim to turn web users into web-makers,” explained Tandog. “[Maker Parties] are not just about web-making, but showing people how they can share what they make through the web. And what they can make is not limited to the web [itself]: it could be robotics, crafts, web apps, or electronics.”

“This is probably one of the biggest maker parties that the Philippines has seen,“ said Amira Dhalla from New York, Mozilla’s Campaign Manager for the Webmaker Project. “It’s phenomenal seeing the breadth of what people are doing. You have small shops of developing, there are 15-year old high school students who have developed their own online protection privacy [software]…so you definitely see the hunger for new kinds of things, for wanting to be able to do it, for wanting to explore these new technical avenues for them to create and become producers.”

Filipino creativity is not at all a surprise but having initiatives like the Maker Festival Manila is one of those things that we as a nation needs in order to showcase exactly what we are capable of. It may not have been the World’s Fair, but based on the inspiring showcase and budding talent present in the fest, we are not far off. — TJD, GMA News