Thanks for the post and for sponsoring lunch at the inaugural Cre8Camp, which is indeed at capacity.

As the co-founder of Cre8Camp and someone who has written tens of thousands of lines of code in my time, I totally agree that there is creativity in software development (that’s one of the things I really liked about it) and also that many developers have talents and skills in other creative endeavors. I myself am a long-time musician and songwriter.

However, as a marketer, you can appreciate identifying a target market segment for a particular product and developing a brand position and messaging for that segment, which is part what I do when I help to develop new event properties such as Cre8Camp and the new version of the Portland Creative Conference, which originally ran from 1990 – 2001.

In your post you asked what we mean by “creatives” and make certain assumptions that aren’t valid. In fact, the answer to your question was already there, linked right from the word “creatives” everytime it appears on the Cre8Camp.org wiki.

Via that link, “creatives” in this case are defined as people involved in “creative industries” as defined by Wikipedia, which includes the software industry among several other industries.

So “creatives” is just a shortcut way of saying that for messaging purposes. I included the link to Wikipedia to avoid just this type of debate.

Yes, I totally agree that everyone is creative, but that is not the right messaging to attract a core authentic audience to an event. For example, the original run of the Portland Creative Conference from 1990 – 2001 targeted professionals in the film, television, advertising and interactive industries with our brand position and messaging. We got the target audience to show up, but also attracted many other people such as technologists, developers, real estate professionals and attorneys, and that was great. However, if our messaging was directed at those other segements, we would’ve lost the core professional audience that everyone was there to network with and learn from in the first place.

I have spent most of my volunteer time during the past 20 years building bridges between the creative and technical communities in Portland. I am an early pioneer in doing that as many Portland veterans will attest. In fact that’s how I first became involved in the original run of the Portland Creative Conference. As another example, the professional association I founded, the Internet Strategy Forum, includes a primary objective of bridging the gap between corporate IT and marketing. It is one of the reasons that organization has resonated with with the target corporate market.

Cre8Camp is not about dividing, but about providing a service that is missing for a certain segment based on feedback that I had been hearing around town. Many of the people in creative industries (outside of software) that I talked to had never heard of BarCamp or even the unconference format, so we are helping to introduce it to a new segment and that in itself is helping to bridge a gap.