Florida Creatives - Creating a Community of Innovation

Every month, a group that samples Orlando's forward-thinkers, inventors, entrepreneurs and future front-page makers gets together to chat and catch up over some cajun food and drink downtown at the Crooked Bayou on Central Ave and Magnolia. We get started at 6PM and go until 9PM or later most months.

Florida Creatives Happy Hours are the third Monday of the month in Orlando - the next meeting will be this Monday, November 17th. You can get more information about this event and future goings-on around Orlando and Florida at www.FloridaCreatives.com

Our group also plays host to an international monthly event called Likemind. The event is held over morning coffee in over 50 cities around the world on the third Friday of the month: Orlando has had Likemind for about 2 years now, and we meet downtown at the Lake Eola Panera Bread starting at 8AM. The next Likemind is November 5th. Likemind was also recently featured in the New York Times, which you can read about on our website.

FloridaCreatives.com also hosts a variety of other features, like a monthly podcast which profiles notable members of our community, and we have 2 years worth of archives hiding behind our Podcast link at the top of the page.

We highly encourage you to register for the site - the immediate benefit is email updates for any new front page posts, as well as comments. We also have a number of groups, like the Brevard and Jacksonville groups, or interest-based groups like Graphics Hackers. You can join as many groups as you like, and you are welcome to post Articles, Events, Wiki Pages, Polls, Podcasts and Forum Posts to any group, including the main Florida Creatives Group.

The Florida Creatives Wiki aims to be a comprehensive resource for anyone seeking information related to living and working as a creative professional in Florida - we've got a list of open wifi hotspots, a list of Networking Events and User Groups, a directory of useful local Websites, Businesses, Schools, Blogs, and lots more. You can also add pages or modify existing pages to make the resource better for everyone.

On our Events page you can find a calendar of events which our users have posted to our site, as well as a feed of events aggregated and collated from other groups around Central Florida. Once you are registered, adding an event is as simple as clicking a link in the sidebar and typing some basic information.

In the future, we are also working on a way to showcase the work of our members by allowing them to upload samples of their work in a directory. We also welcome your feedback as to what sorts of benefits you'd like to get out of a community like this.

I hope you can be excited as I am about everything one can get out of putting a small amount of effort in. First and foremost is always the face-to-face interactions we have at monthly meetings and the relationships that are formed there.