Collaboration Celebration

The Eureka Factory is a collaborative of creative individuals and business partners who believe in the power of community driven innovation to help people move from passive consumption to empowered and active creation of their future and ours. – Our Welcome Page



In recent weeks we’ve become keenly aware of an increasingly wonderful dynamic about the Eureka Factory: It’s fun!

At work, the Eureka Factory specializes in helping libraries and other community organizations develop makerspaces and creative programming, and produces hands-on, minds-on-fire events like Gulf Coast MakerCon, Tampa Bay’s annual maker festival, and ROBOTICON Tampa Bay, a youth FIRST robotics showcase.

At play, we do pretty much the same thing.

The Eureka Factory came into being as a creative vehicle for us to do things we feel help make the world a better place, with people who not only have amazing skill sets , but who are fine friends and good company. We find ourselves in total agreement with graphic designer, Milton Glaser, who has observed that his best professional achievements occurred in partnership with people whose company he genuinely enjoyed.

“Only groups that really work together with the sense of commonality ultimately accomplish anything in civilization,” he said in an article in Inc., earlier this year. .

This week our creative collaborative – Team Eureka Factory! – will be front and center in downtown Tampa all weekend long, at the Tampa Bay Library Consortium Annual Meeting on Friday, Nov. 14, where I’ll be speaking about the power of collaboration; at the Hive makerspace grand opening during the Andrew Carnegie Centennial event at John F. Germany Library on Saturday, Nov. 15 – where we’ll be working on our Scanotron project for Boca Bearing Company, and facilitating our Deconstruction project – and at TEDxYouth@TampaRiverwalk on Sunday, Nov. 16.

At each of these events, our creative partners and friends will be working on their own and shared projects, like Sumo Software’s ASCII Warriors young programmers club at the Hive event, Chuck Stephens leading the Deconstruction, and support from F5Live for the TEDxYouth event. All of these efforts are aimed at showcasing and inspiring active creation over passive consumption, towards helping people see that the Life Creative is not just a more enjoyable and fulfilling life, but a community building path towards economic fulfillment, social well being and personal empowerment.

People who are curious and interested in the world around them, who are comfortable asking questions, and open minded about the answers that may present themselves, become people unafraid, strong, courageous, compassionate and innovative people, and hopefully collaborative people.

We need each other in this world, and we need to be the best people we can be for each other. Join us this weekend, in spirit if not in person, for a Collaboration Celebration, and help make the world a better place together.