Follow up on Next Steps

As mentioned elsewhere in this guide, a good Town Hall starts a conversation that you’ll want to see continue among the participants.

Here’s some potential next steps, we’ve seen come out of Town Halls

Potential Next Steps

  • Ask attendees for feedback on sessions they liked and recommendations for people to reach out to in the future.
  • Field a survey of Maker activity much like Portland Made does each year
    You can find this survey in the last two pages of this document.
  • Take the recommendations outlined in the Maker City book and commit as a community to executing 10 of them over the next year
    There are over 90 recommendations in the book, organized at the end of each Chapter under “implications for cities”.
  • Decide to meet regularly to discuss how your Maker ecosystem is evolving
    Pittsburgh did this. From a single pancake breakfast sprung an ongoing set of meetings that reshaped education and eventually the economic fabric of Pittsburgh itself.
  • Identify one or more holes in your ecosystem and create an action-oriented plan to fill that hole.
    To get started, map your ecosystem as described in Chapter 3 of the Maker City book.

If you are applying for a micro grant from the Nation of Makers to support your Town Hall be aware that you will have an added responsibility for sharing information about your Town Hall within the first six months after the event. You can do this one of three (3) ways:

  • Write an article detailing the event to be featured on the Nation of Makers Medium publication and potentially other media outlets
  • Open source the agenda, planning documents, and feedback that could be helpful to other cities/regions that want to plan their own Maker Town Halls/Summits
  • Provide a briefing about the event during a subsequent community call and/or Nation of Makers convening