In 2022, Open Works led an effort to pass SB 453, the Maryland Makerspace Initiative Program. The state legislature appropriated $5M over five years to "expand or establish" makerspaces throughout the state, and is the first bill of its kind in the US. This advocacy effort involved support from many organizations, including the Nation of Makers, Open Source Medical Supplies, and Coppin State University.
The Maker Policy Playbook uses the story of that process to illustrate how to advocate for maker-friendly policies in your community! At the end of the book, an open-source toolkit includes the policy paper, legislation, social media graphics, and op-ed used in our successful campaign. The PDF download also includes hyperlinks to digital copies of these documents to make them easy to remix and reuse in other campaigns.
Written by Open Works' Executive Director Will Holman.
PDF download. 55 pp.
This eBook is a FREE and open source (but we encourage you to kick in a $5 or $10 donation level if you would like to support our work) digital download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. Users may share, adapt, and remix these files as long as Open Works is credited as the originator and the book is not used for commercial purposes.