Dale Dougherty is the CEO and Founder of Make Media, publisher of Make Magazine. He has been called the “godfather of the Maker movement”, having founded both the magazine and the first Maker Faire in 2006. Dale was instrumental in launching the Maker movement which is reshaping science and technology education and creating unprecedented economic opportunity for young people and a renaissance in urban manufacturing.

Dale
Dale started down this path in 1984, when he worked with Tim O’Reilly to create O’Reilly Media, publisher of “Nutshell” handbooks. At O’Reilly Media Dale developed the Hacks series of books, coined the term Web 2.0, and then creating the Web 2.0 Conference, a joint venture between O’Reilly and CMP.

The idea for Make Magazine came from his experiences with the Hacks books, as Dale recognized that hackers were playing with hardware and more broadly, were looking at how to hack the world, not just computers. Make Magazine is a re-invention of Popular Mechanics for the 21st Century, and it launched in 2005. A year later, Dale launched the first Maker Faire in San Mateo to bring together all the Makers to share their work with each other and with the public. In 2016, there will be 150+ Maker Faires worldwide.

In addition the Maker City Playbook, Dale is the author of the upcoming book Free to Make (Fall 2016, North Atlantic Books) and sits on the boards of Make Media, Maker Education Initiative, and the non-profit Big Picture Learning.