Oakland Maker City is the vision of a future Oakland that meets the basic needs of residents and moves beyond basic needs to give all Oaklanders the tools, resources, and opportunities to grow, learn, explore their interests, and build new things collaboratively. It's an Oakland that's built by good faith collaboration and that equips residents with the skills we need to collaborate on solving the problems we see in our communities and building what we need together.

A major element of the idea is of a network (official? unofficial? unknown!) of spaces of collaborative production that are open to many people, so for example, you have community gardens, public libraries, hackerspaces, sewing collectives, open carpentry workshops, and more. Basically, if you can have open spaces where you can go to make and learn different kinds of things, you can have the whole city act as your university and your factory and your garden. With little pieces from here and there, you can start to see an Oakland filled with different specialized sites of providing the pieces of the puzzle that allow people to have a livelihood, learn things, and create new things together.

There are many people, groups, and organizations that are making this kind of Oakland a possibility. We're mapping out the landscape of folks who are building the things that will make the Oakland Maker City a reality here on the wiki.  If this is the kind of vision that you/your organization is working on or is probably a part of (ie, libraries!), please feel free to add an entry for yourself and tag it "oakland maker city."

If you'd like to be a part of organizing efforts around making this idea a reality, you can join this google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/oaklandmakercity

Here are the elements of something like this:

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Get a feel for what a maker city might be like...here's some further reading:

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