Being Part of the Maker Community & Winning the InfyMakers Award!
If you’re not familiar with the Maker Movement, it represents the continually growing community of inventors, designers, and tinkerers who come together and form localized groups to discuss and display what they’ve created.
Make Magazine was established in 2005 to promote and share these DIY (Do-It-Yourself) projects that often occur in people’s homes, garages, and workshops. Since Make's inception, MakerSpaces, which are community shared workspaces featuring tools and space to create projects have sprung up all over the world. The range of makers’ inventions are broad; however, projects usually fall within the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, or Mathematics (STEAM) spectrum.
We love being part of this movement because makers have an intense curiosity and fascination with how things work.
At the 2015 World Maker Faire, an event Make Magazine describes as the Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth, OHorizons had a booth to show off the open-source, DIY Wood Mold we’ve engineered for the production of concrete BioSand Filters. BioSand Filters are safe, easy-to-use, and affordable water filters that go into families homes in rural communities of developing countries where the local population doesn't have access to a safe drinking water source.
In 2015, our Wood Mold was awarded a Make Magazine Editors’ Choice Blue Ribbon. Only a small percentage of the over 900 exhibitors received this distinction! In 2016, we were awarded a Red Ribbon for "Excellence in Education." You can read more about us being bestowed with these honors HERE.
On the opening night of World MakerFaire people were handing out flyers about an upcoming design contest. A few weeks later we went to the website of the Infosys Foundation USA’s InfyMakers Award Contest.
“A contest to showcase your innovative thinking and making to solve problems facing individuals, communities and our world!”
What a perfect fit for OHorizons! We created a 90 second video about our innovation and entered it into the contest. Our video was selected as a finalist along with 24 other projects. As a finalist, we had 3 weeks to get as many people to vote for us as possible. The official vote tallies were never released, but we know a lot of you voted for us daily because on March 16th we were announced as a winner!
Thank you to everyone who voted for us and helped spread the word about our entry. We could not have won this award without your support!
The $10,000 award winnings went directly towards our safe drinking water project in Bangladesh.
If you voted for us in this contest, your effort is already providing 1,000 people with safe drinking water access for a lifetime. Thank You!
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