Institute For The Future

Maker Faire: It's About Rethinking Assumptions

Maker Faire opened today with a Maker Day—a time for Makers to meet each other and showcase some of their cool projects. As I was listening to Umberto Crenca, one of the founders of AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, RI, that provides spaces for different types of media artists and performers, it occurred to me that the Faire is not just about seeing great DIY projects, it is about much more; it is about breaking established modes of thinking, established approaches to living, working, organizing. Crenca, for example, told the audience that all employees of AS220, from managing director to administrative assistant, get paid the same--there are no pay differentials across the organization. This may be a crazy idea that wouldn’t work in any other organization, but it immediately sparked my curiosity. What would happen if pay differentials were eliminated in the workplace? In what types of organizations might it work? What might be the consequences? How and why do people at AS220 like this arrangement? The organization has been around for over 20 years, so this must be working for them. Why not for others? After all, it is not written in stone and it is not a law of nature that people have to accept big pay discrepancies in the workplace. We've come to accept this as a inviolable law but oviously some organizations and people are challenging the dogma. Who knows, it may be crazy but it also maybe a breakthrough idea…I hope we will be picking up a lot more of these at the Maker Faire—ideas that shift the way we look at the world.