Last month , on my way home from the newstools2008 conference, I stopped in at the Maker Faire, which had spread itself across a fairground in San Mateo, California the way a kid’s toy box gets spilled on a coffee table.

The event showcases the hacks, projects, exhibits and demos of hundreds of Bay Area crafters, geeks and hobbyists. It was a fantastic show full of steampunk gewgaws, lasers, robots, erotic stitchery and a life size mechanical mousetrap.

But, back to newstools2008 for a minute. As I mentioned last month, the conference pulled technologists and journalists together to figure out how we could hack a fresh news ecology that served democracy.

Dawn Buie, a Toronto-based web developer had attended newstools2008 and saw a video I posted about the Maker Faire. In an email she sent me, she saw the connection between both events.

“All these people who are creative and dedicated and they just show up with their own projects – because. I wonder if news media in the future will be more like that. But we may not recognize all of it as being news … it would instead be the product of communities mapping their own spaces and displaying the results with interactive maps and people recording personal histories, collaborative timelines, position papers for a government, community videos for and against issues on election ballots.”

That’s really smart. One of the great things about the Maker Faire is its focus: on rule-busting creation. There was a t-shirt that was for sale there that read: “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”

The Faire was about hacking consumer goods, reusing and reinventing junk and mashing up decades, fashion and science fiction for your own purposes. It was about turning passive consumers into active makers. What used to be finished goods was now just raw material for a whole new productive cycle that starts with the audience formerly known as consumers.

This is the mindset that turns a disposable camera and a cheap microphone into a high speed flash trigger, refocuses Victorian technology and fashion through the Charles Babbage lens of steam-driven computer tech, or takes a couple of motors, a chair and some fabric and creates a giant cupcake car (many of which were puttering around the fairgrounds).

It’s also the mindset that gets former consumers to distrust pre-digested news and start hacking their own coverage, their own critiques and start covering their communities with cheap technology and mashups of off-the-shelf Web 2.0 tools.

The time is right to hack our news. Legacy journalism is trying to grock social media the way a crossing guard tries to horn in on a teen sleepover. It’s sort of embarrassing to watch. The truth is, great journalism takes great journalists and dedicated citizens willing to contribute money, content or shoe leather out of love, civic duty or just to expend some pent up cognitive surplus.

Consider the music industry. What we’ve learned over the past five years is that great music can happen (and can be financially viable) if great musicians connect with fans willing to support them directly: Jonathan Coulton being the poster boy for that kind of relationship. Or, let’s flip back to the Maker Faire and that Life Size Mousetrap.

Mark Perez, the man behind the humungous contraption built it with his pals over the last 13 years from surplus parts. The kinetic sculpture/vaudeville they created is funded by a very cool corporate sponsor (Laughing Squid Web Hosting), a donation bucket and t-shirt sales. So, great entertainment created by a small team of smart folks supported by a company and a group of fans who micropay to make it happen.

Back at newstools2008, that’s the same model Hal Plotkin is using on the ReelChanges site he unveiled at the journalism conference. At ReelChanges documentary journalists pitch their work and aim to get small donations from a community of citizens who want to see the documentary get made. He’s already got nearly 500 projects on the site.

So, yeah, Dawn’s right, the Rube Goldberg crazy quilt of creativity that is the Maker Faire is a really good metaphor for the future of journalism.

It’s messy, noisy and sometimes features cupcakes on wheels. But if that’s the future we hack, it’s going to be a lot more fun than the present we have. I think democracy is a lot like consumer electronics. If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.

wayne

Wayne MacPhail

Wayne MacPhail has been a print and online journalist for 25 years. He was the managing editor of Hamilton Magazine and was a reporter and editor at The Hamilton Spectator until he founded Southam InfoLab,...