Today the DHMakerBus team was thrilled by the announcement that we had won London’s first big&bold event.

For anyone out there who hasn’t heard of big&bold, it was a challenge presented to the London community by Mindstack, a local startup building a cloud-based platform for collaboration. Mindstack challenged Londoners to think big and act boldly by creating a collaborative project that brought our community together around a big and bold idea.

Our big and bold idea was MAKE London, an event celebrating the amazing work that makers are doing in our city. On November 23rd we brought makers together at Edgar and Joe’s Cafe to show their work off to the community. Despite winter’s wrath we had an amazing turn out and had the opportunity to connect with a lot of new faces in our community.

I wanted to write this post as a small form of thanks to everyone that helped make our event a success. While it would be impossible to fully express my gratitude in a blog post, I want to recognize the overwhelming support we’ve experienced from the community.

First of all my deepest thanks go to Mindstack for planning big&bold and for the generous prize money that they put forward to the winner of the event. It’s inspiring to see a startup putting such value on community collaboration. The team at Mindstack truly practices what they preach and I look forward to seeing how they continue to facilitate collaboration in our community.

Secondly thanks to all the makers who helped make big&bold a success. From Richie and James Bullbrook who showed off their homemade skate park, to Chef Dacha from Kantina Restaurant for volunteering his time to demonstrate how to made liquid nitrogen ice-cream, to Joe Fonseca who showed us how historians are making use of technology, to the London Public Library for showing us how libraries are embracing making, we cannot express how much your support means to us. If I haven’t mentioned you specifically in this post, I look forward to thanking you in person in the coming days.

Thirdly our thanks go out to Edgar and Joe’s Cafe for graciously lending us their space and allowing MAKE London to exist. Their cafe, and the Goodwill Industries Building as a whole, is an inspiring example of social innovation in London. And if you haven’t tried their $5 breakfast, you’re missing out on one of the best breakfasts in town.

Last, and by no means least, thanks to everyone who braved the weather to attend MAKE London. After working on the MakerBus project now for the past eight months, I’m continually impressed by the curiosity of our community. Londoners have a never-ending desire to learn, to tinker, and to explore. I find our community’s curiosity inspiring.

Winning big&bold means a lot to our project. We will use the prize money to buy new equipment which we will use to help inspire Londoners to continue to learn, experiment, and grow. Our team is going to sit down this week and decide on our next equipment acquisition – once decided stayed tuned for a post describing how we plan to use this equipment to engage our community.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make MAKE London a success. Some buses run on gas, but our’s run on community support. Thank you for giving us the fuel to move forward.

-Ryan Hunt

DHMakerBus Co-founder