Neighbouring communities: interaction, lessons and opportunities

Building, understanding and sharing software that works in creative spaces is increasingly popular and widespread, with many communities outside of academic research interested in pursuing questions highly relevant to Computational Creativity. We report here on several notable communities in the area: the Procedural Generation Jam, the National Novel Generating Month, the Twitterbot community and the #CreativeAI movement. By studying these communities, we benefit from different perspectives on building creative software, as well as how communities of like-minded people form, grow and sustain themselves. We reflect on these communities as sources of lessons for our field and opportunities for future growth and knowledge exchange, as well as raising awareness of sources of inspiration beyond academia.