Questions? Ask @Daniel Gerous on Twitter
Evo has a great conversation with Todd Huffman about his current Gangplank project Sstitch, his recent trip to Afghanistan, and the upcoming BIL Conference he’s helping to organize.
With the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference in town, we’re visited by three of the top speakers: Gary Vaynerchuck, Matt Mullenweg and Marcus Nelson. Discussing iPhone applications, what upcoming tech to look for and . . . birthplaces.
Quick links: South by Southwest Conference, TweetDeck, Quitter
We got with the program and burned all the feeds so we can track your awesome participation. Please Subscribe or update your settings:
Main Gangplank Site Feed (Aggregates all content);
http://feeds.gangplankhq.com/gangplankphx
Gangplank Studios Podcast only feed:
http://feeds.gangplankhq.com/gangplankstudio
Rock on party people, rock on.
PS: We’ll have more feeds in the near term, specifically for event schedules and Academy sessions (video)
Luz and James Archer put on a great little event within hacknight this week that they labeled Photo Mojo. It is similar to phthrd. The concept (loosely) is that a bunch of photographers of various levels and backgrounds all meet up. Then a set of topics/words are chosen collectively. The photographers are broken into teams and have a set time to shoot and edit photos that represent the set of topics/words. Each team can then submit one photo per topic/word to be evaluated. A winner for each topic/word is then chosen. Fun is had.
For this Photo Mojo the words were Orbital, Epidemic and Scholarly. The time frame was one hour.
Here are the winners for each topic/word.
Orbital
Epidemic
Scholarly
Seems to no longer be available. 
You can rate the photos yourself on Pix.ly.
Evo is back with Josh Strebel and Jade Meskill to talk about the state of Gangplank today and what the future holds.
Now that more attention is being placed on the Studio — and the podcasts we record there –, we thought it would be handy to list out WHEN we’d be recording shows, and who might be on them.
Gangplank Studios Recording Calendar
If you’re available and interested in being a guest, check with the host of the show in advance. We’ll get you set up and added to the calendar!
Beau Frusetta shares his start-up experience working within the Gangplank Incubator. Beau’s web app, DateDesigner helps you build a better date.
http://www.vimeo.com/2231299The Gangplank Academy hosts discussions from local experts, entreprenuers, and creatives every Wednesday at 11:45pm (lunch hour). Free admission, stay all afternoon into the evening for Hacknight.
325 E Elliot Rd, Suite 34. Chandler, AZ
CerealBar Phoenix is this Friday, November 14th at 8am. If you want to come hang out with your fellow geeks, eat some yummy cereal, and talk about what’s happening in Phoenix tech this is the event for you! Visit the website, please sign up so we know how many to plan for!
Evo is back with Steve Swedler’s developers Chase Granberry, and Beau Frusetta to talk about the development of their respective projects Authority Labs and Date Designer, and where they’re at now.
I had started to create the upcoming speaker list for Gangplank brown bag sessions earlier this week and passed it around to a few of our anchor tenants to get feedback and ideas. It then dawned on me that we have been doing these sessions for nearly 5 months and that it would be a good idea to get some idea of how those participating felt. At Integrum we do something at the end of every week/iteration called a retrospective. This allows us to inspect and adapt what we do and how we do it to follow a cycle of constant improvement.
The retrospective can take many formats, because our brown bags get a sizeable attendance I decided to use the what should we keep doing, what should we stop doing and what are we missing approach. Within seconds people were giving excellent feed back in each category. Below are the raw items expressed.
Doing Well
Grass roots marketing
Branding (member owned)
Events (Startup Weekend/Brown Bags/Etc)
Unified community
Fun
Consistency
A Lot in a short time
Doing Poorly
Lack of chairs
Variety of Topics (get wider)
Poor update of events (not facebook)
Introducing/welcoming new people
Communicating vision
Promoting coworking aspect
Starting on time
Whats Missing
Offer more things at hacknight
User generated content
Skill matching
Reaching out to other communities
Community projects (opportunities to give back)
Startup Wednesday
Ambience (paint it damn it)
No way to give back
How to participate at a higher level (path to involvement)
Clock
Sponsorship
Reach outside current items
Random Fun (ie: lipdub, etc)
Teams (dodgeball, softball, etc)
Place to have discussions
So what does this mean? What are should we do with this information? Well we need to keep doing events. Have an event that you need a home for? Let us know. We need to keep having fun. Come join us having a good time! We have made a commitment to get a few chairs for co-working every month until we are no longer short. We need folding chairs for events and hacknights. Do you have some to donate? Know where to get a good deal let us know!
We brainstormed topics and speakers (and will share later in this post). James Archer from Forty has stepped up and is putting some things in place to help us welcome new people and introduce them. The hacknight website needs to be people not project centered and allow for people to contribute more readily. We are getting some of the necessities of life finished (like hanging the projector) and are about ready to start adding the decorators touch. Interested in helping, LET US KNOW. We have decided that we want to make a section of the commons open to be redecorated on a regular basis allowing it to reflect the community directly. We hope to add a clock. Joshua Strebel of Obuweb and Steve Swedler are hard at work getting us an energy drink sponsor.
If you haven’t noticed, we want your participation. Do you see opportunities and have the passion to fill them? Let us know. We want to empower you to help make the Gangplank commons your own.
The discussion on speakers and topics resulted in the following. I will be adding this to my current list. If you have suggestions please let us know.
Speakers
James Armstrong (trademark/copyright)
Brent Spore (design)
Tara Hunt (co-working, social networking)
Patrick Sullivan Jr.
Patrick Sullivan Sr.
Dean Heckler (furniture designer)
Rene Gutel (newspaper)
Kevin Burke (Angel Investor)
Erika Feinberg (Active Living)
Topics
Artists
Architects
Tax CPA
Pyschologist
Sociologist
Branding
Interactive Design
Industrial Design
Business Management
Successful Business Owners
PR
Green Tech
Updates on local stuff
Share projects (demo day)
Sports Team/Performance
We wrapped up the session discussing what might make good Academy sessions. As part of that it came out that that concept of “camps” make sense for Academy structure as well. 2-8hr concentrated events around a theme. iPhoneDevCamp, BarCamp, MarketingCamp etc only in a myriad of verticals. KnittingCamp 2009 baby!
Academy (camps)
Database architecture
Lan Party
Water color painting
Yoga
Typography (@luzbonita has offerred to step up!)
Accessibility
Design Web
Gangplank Junior
Photography
Photohard (@luzbonita has offerred to step up!)
Sales
Knitting
Scrapbooking
In a nutshell, this is a call for participation. We look forward to hearing from you.
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