I’m still learning about what Gangplank really is and how the collaborative ethic operates when people are all doing it in one room. You can’t communicate very much about the approach in a quick description to others who don’t know about it. It’s a two step communication. First, it’s a place for innovation and collaboration where cool things are happening. (Stop by and see it.) Second, it’s a place where the more complex thing happens – the collaborative, participative, unstructured thing.

I have found that people I know who were not Gangplank devotees were completely confused and negative about Gangplank. The new simple “front end” story gives them something to understand and get interested in. I can get the heads nodding now. They have to visit Gangplank and participate to really get it, but they have to be interested and stop by to do that.

Borrow away – my only goal was to help. And I agree about “structured location”…

B

That statement is really raw form to internally build on. This is not necessarily something we put out as the gangplank “elevator pitch” or “mission statement”. This just allows us to get our focus to create those types of things.

1. Absolutely exclusionary, but that is where the freedom is. We don’t have to be all things to all people. We have a sharper focus. It doesn’t mean that anyone outside that litmus test isn’t welcome, just that they are not our ‘target’.

2. New economy is somewhat nebulous and mission statement/elevator pitches will word it differently. For the purpose of this exercise everyone was on same page for what that term meant.

I don’t like “structured location” as I think it mis-represents some of the chaos that makes gangplank as a place work, but I do like the rest of the statement quite a bit. We might borrow liberally.

Thanks for the awesome feedback!

I think you have to ask yourself who that definition is for. While I’m sure that sentence is meaningful and compelling to those who already consider themselves part of the Gangplank family – I’m willing to bet people who are not will have no idea what it means.

Two concrete points:
1) The first part is exclusionary. You’ve basically set up two subjective litmus tests limiting who should care about Gangplank (and by extension who Gangplank cares about).
2) The “new economy” part should get dropped in favor of a concrete statement that tells us what the outcome is. New economy is really subjective…

This is probably far to “corporate” but it might help:

Gangplank is a structured location designed to unstructure the way people think and work enabling community, collaboration, creativity and innovation with an emphasis on fundamentally altering the greater Phoenix economy.