It’s the other Wednesday, so I’m at Phoenix Square Film and
Digital Media Centre for
the fortnightly meeting of CreativeCoffee
Club. That’s two
meetings in a row I’ve made – a feat I haven’t achieved since I don’t know
when.
In a subtle innovation this morning, we have
a couple of “table experts”, whom attendees can meet one-to-one for a quarter
of an hour of free advice.
As you’ll see form the picture above, faithful
reader, I still find it hard to get a photo inside Phoenix Square that makes it
look like there's a decent number of people here. Is it because I’m taking pics
on my iPhone? We must have 20-odd attending CreativeCoffee Club this morning – I’ve
tried to squeeze in as many of them as I could.
The
regular session is followed at noon by the first meeting of a new committee formed
to take stock of the past and present of CreativeCoffee Club and to chart its
possible future. The meeting is convened by Cheryl Gill, Enterprise Support
Officer at LCB Depot and Phoenix Square. Cheryl took charge of CreativeCoffee
Club in April and will hold the reins till March next year. Emma Moore, Jed
Spittle and I were on the short-lived committee that met only once eight months
ago and which (despite our best intentions) managed to lead CreativeCoffee Club
down a bit of a dead end. Steve Bowes, Russ Pacey and Ben Ravilious are also in
this new committee today.
I’ve
been having a bit of trouble with my hearing over the past few weeks. Every so
often, my right ear switches off, which leads to some unusual effects (and to
me looking a bit rude sometimes, I imagine). In this meeting, I hear Ben saying
that he’s acting as “Neville’s Advocate” quite a lot.
We
oldies provide a little bit of historical context, especially for those
relatively new to CreativeCoffee Club. When CreativeCoffee Club relocated to
Phoenix Square from its first home in the Graduate Bar at De Montfort
University, it continued its pattern of meeting on alternate Wednesday mornings.
One of the other Wednesday mornings would be occupied by a monthly public
meeting of Amplified Leicester (same time, same venue, if a different room).
Those sessions of Amplified Leicester featured innovative speakers (some of
them from other parts of the country, a few from other parts of the world),
more formal presentations, more structured participation. Amplified Leicester was
the filling in the sandwich then, with a slice of CreativeCoffee Club on either
side. That allowed reasonable differentiation between the two kinds of meetings
and allowed each to develop its own character – even though, more often than
not, it was the same crowd attending both (and one Wednesday morning out of
four free). If someone didn’t take to the more relaxed nature of CreativeCoffee
Club, they could come to Amplified Leicester – and vice versa. In the last
phase of Amplified Leicester these public meetings moved to Wednesday evenings.
Once Amplified Leicester came to an end in summer 2011, we were left with two slices
of bread but no filling – nice bread, but all the same … Two floppy slices of
bread, flapping around in search of a decent filling isn’t the most attractive
prospect.
In terms of charting the
future, we begin by discussing ways to refresh the brand. An immediate decision
is made regarding the name. From now on, it’s going to be Creative Coffee
Leicester (CC Leic for short, which matches up nicely with the Twitter feed:
@CCLeic). I never got “CreativeCoffee Club”. I couldn’t understand why those
first two words were run together like that, with the initial C in “Coffee” set
upper case. I could see no logic or sense in it, no benefit or good effect arising
from it – and no one I asked about it could explain it to me. I couldn’t find
one person, involved in the network or outside it, who could understand it
themselves or explain it to me. Why not run all three words together and make
all three initial Cs upper case? Being different for its own sake is just
annoying. It’s juvenile. A punch in the face is memorable, but I wouldn’t want
another one. I don’t need or want funny spelling to make something memorable. The
experience should be memorable for the right reasons to those who have had it
and desirable to those who haven’t had it yet.
Well, that’s been one of
my biggest moans for years and now it’s been dealt with. Mind you, I find
people saying “Creative Coffee” annoying in the same way as when you hear
people saying “Thomas the Tank”. What’s that? Just leave it, you say? Hmmm …
Actually, that won’t matter
now, as we’ve also agreed to drop the word Club from the title. We don’t want
to make it sound cliquish or exclusive, that you have to apply for membership,
or that some people are in and some are out.
A
straw poll was conducted at the meeting on 4 April, asking attendees to answer the
following questions (among others):
- Should
we should from fortnightly meetings to monthly meetings?
- Should
we introduce ourselves at the beginning of each session?
- Should
we wear badges / labels?
- Should
we have speakers?
We
say yes to occasional speakers. We can encourage potential speakers by
offering this as a networking opportunity which will
be to their for the benefit as much as it is to their listeners. More “table experts”
too – although there’s no reason why they shouldn’t always be brought in from
outside the regular attendees.
At the start of a
meeting, we could have a kind of “Open Mic”, giving newbies an opportunity to
introduce themselves and for Committee Members to announce “Parish Notes”.
There’s a new website under
construction, which is obviously the topic of much of our conversation today. We
discuss its content and its style. The site could feature profiles of those who
use Creative Coffee frequently and regularly (as used to be on Amplified
Leicester’s ning). Each person’s profile could show their response to a small
set of questions (e.g.):
- “Why do I come to
Creative Coffee?”
- “What do I get out of
Creative Coffee?”
- “What do I bring to
Creative Coffee?”
- “Who do I hope to meet
at Creative Coffee?”
There's more discussed than I've recorded here. Cheryl takes fuller and
more professional notes of the meeting, which she’ll circulate soon. We’ll be
meeting again immediately after the next Creative Coffee session on Wednesday 13
June.
