As David (Tebbo) has already related over on the CreativeCoffee Club site, Toby, David and I met up just before the first CCC meeting at the Star Café for a bite of breakfast, before we headed to Foyles Café. Our chosen venue co-exists with Ray’s Jazz - that meant we got some cool bepop, and later on fusion from the likes of Steps Ahead as the soundtrack to our first meeting. It was a good venue, but even with the 18 people who came, it was bit cramped, and we were getting in the way of the regulars. My thanks to Jason, the manager, but I think we’ll be finding a new venue for next time.
However, it was a great success. We met some seriously smart people who are interested in the creativity topic. Some friends, like Mary Harrington from The School of Everything, a London startup that was shortlisted for Seedcamp, and some people I didn’t know, like Bob Stein and Chris Meade from The Institute for the Future of the Book. I talked to Bob about Microsoft’s Seadragon technology, and about integrating some editing software he works with in to Blogtronix. Mary was still smiling through gritted teeth about not having won Seedcamp, but I’m sure the exposure will do her new venture some good. I met Jon Collins from Freeform Dynamics, the research and analysis company that David has just joined. I met Lisa Gee, and Nicola Percy - Nicola is a photographic artist, and the sister-in-law of Triona Carey, who plans to open a CreativeCoffee Club down in Plymouth. Gordon Joly, one of my friends from London Wiki Wednesdays was there too.
Leean Pindar, a radio journalist, was wandering around interviewing people. You can hear her first, great contribution already posted over at our Facebook group.
CCC has only been going a few weeks, but we already have people interested in starting groups in several other locations around the UK, as well as in Los Angeles and Menlo Park near San Francisco in the USA.
Our objective was to get people together to talk about creativity, and to see what happens. We’re hoping to help people make new connections, and to get people to think and write about how we can get creativity in to the DNA of our organisations. Everybody seemed to enjoy the session, so I think we’ve made a good start.
Here are my Flickr photos of the event.
