Where do they come from?
Where to people come from to attend Maker Faire Milwaukee? Where do the Makers travel from to join us and share the things they make?
These are questions we started wondering in 2016, and we did a trial of collecting location information (just their zip code) from attendees and makers so we could find some answers. The test was successful, and revealed some interesting data, so we expanded it and rolled it out in 2017 and did it again in 2018. The map above shows where Makers and attendees traveled from in 2017 and 2018 to take part in Maker Faire Milwaukee.
Here’s a quick “how to” for the live map embedded above. If you touch the icon in the upper left of the map…
You’ll get a sidebar showing the different views you can choose from. (We break it down by year, and separate Makers and attendees. Each year has its own color as well.)
You can turn on and off the views, so you can toggle between the years, and separate Makers from attendees for some interesting data on where people came from. You can also pan and zoom like you can on any Google Map.
As we’ve pulled all this data together, we’ve been amazed at where people have told us they are from. Back when we started in 2015 we never would have imagined people traveling from across the country to take part in Maker Faire Milwaukee. We hope you’ll join us in 2019 to add a few more pins to the map. 🙂