heh. the state fair police would love that.

i have really mixed feelings on throwies. they're a LOT of fun, but it's usually just throwing away a button cel, which is not generally something you want in the waterways.

I just have reservations about the amount of money it would cost us. I chatted w/UptownMiker about it, and yeeps.

button cels can get pretty cheap when you buy VOLUME, which we'd want to do, but that's a healthy cash outlay, even for crappy questionable kwalitie

figure we can make a lil electric spot welder jig to drop a resistor on an led's leg, and then shrink tube them onto /around the battery, with a piece of paper to slid in as a switch, and we're not looking at big price parts other than the battery, but a lot of prep work

then consider that the get about 1.5M folks. if we *only* see .1% of the bodies, we'd need 1500 of them, or give away about 8 an hour every hour the fair is open. figure we'd only be open half time(unless someone *want's* to staff a booth at 6am), that's a throwie every 4 minutes or so, which i can see us going through a LOT more than that. even at a 6' booth we could fit in a lil weld station and a shrink tube station, (with jigs, folsk put the bits in and close lid and it does it's thing) figure... maybe one a minute for 8 hours a day, for 12 days and that's over 7k of throwies... parts maybe 30c? a pop at those volumes... and we're over 2K in parts.

No no no no... I mean what it would cost us to have a spot at the State Fair. THAT is $$$pendy.

I agree with Theo...but with a caveat.

It might be worth looking into, because they are VERY poor at specification on the website about what they really mean by their price points (i.e., is this in the big buildings, or one of the smaller ones that are full of little organizations and groups, or out on the midway, or what? Or different price points for different locations?)

That all said, if our "booth" was a six-foot table with something set up behind it, that would cost us $360, and only if we agreed not to sell ANYTHING. They charge by the "front-foot", which is a single foot of width to the space. They don't specify what the depth of the space is; my recollection from the Sierra Club booth last year is that it is about 6-8 feet.

Here comes the caveat: when Theo and I talked, I was talking about a 10-foot wide booth. At $60 per front-foot, that's pretty cha-ching, right? But now, considering a six-foot slot ($360), that's not too bad at all, for a space that (conservatively) 50,000 people will walk past in 10 days. It's April; the Fair is in August. That's about 16 weeks, give or take- we'd need to raise $25 a week to make it happen.

Be honest, now: how much, per week, at the TCMaker meetings, do we spend on beer, pie, and snacks? Can we not find 10 TCMakers willing to front $2.50 per week from now until August for that publicity?

I think the bigger question is, can we find 240 Maker-hours of booth-sitting time, assuming we want to try and have two someones at the booth for the for the full 12 hours (9-9, I think) of exhibit hall time for the full 10 days?

It would be *IDEAL* to get a spot in the "green technology" (whatever) building on the hill at the northeast corner of the fair. But anywhere would be great.

While i agree that we need to get our name out there and the fair will give us access to alot of people, i think this year is a little too soon as we still have alot of work to do on other aspects of the group.

Noted! Yes, but if we are able to get a space secured, then I think it's wise and probably doable. Such a small space wouldn't require much prep. I would think we could come up with giveaway gifts easily enough.

If this was for an event next month, I'd agree. As it isn't for another four months, I should hope we will make progress faster than that.

what are deadlines?

if we need the $$ next week it's a lot different than if we need it in august.

imho we've got a LOT of crap to sort through, and that should be our first priority, we *should* have plenty of time to prep something like this after that, but right now we need to keep our nose to the grindstone on getting organized.