President | Make Community, LLC
Dale Dougherty believes that all of us are makers and he celebrates the people and projects that form the Maker Movement. He founded Make: Magazine in 2005, and first used the term “makers” to describe people who enjoyed “hands-on” work and play. He started Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, and which has spread to nearly 200 events in 40 countries, with more than 1.5 million attendees annually. He has advocated for the role of makerspaces in schools, libraries and communities, as well as the importance of providing access to making for everyone, which empowers us to shape the future. He is President of Make Community, LLC, which produces Make Magazine and licenses Maker Faires.
Dougherty is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane Conrad. He is co-author of “Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities” with Peter Hirshberg and Marcia Kadanoff.
In 2011, Dougherty was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire ,he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business.
Prior to Make:, Dougherty was a co-founder of O’Reilly Media, where he was an editor of many early technical books. While at O’Reilly, he developed GNN, the first commercial website, which launched in 1993 and was sold to AOL in 1995. He coined the term “Web 2.0.” He lives in Sebastopol, Calif.