Fitzgerald shows what the Slack app looks like via phone.When The Edney Innovation Center opened its startup-centered workspace downtown two years ago, the building’s facilitators knew they would need more than a water cooler to bring people together.
The building would be home to dozens of different entrepreneurs and enterprises operating on different schedules, with varying company cultures. But the Edney’s leaders still wanted to foster a close-knit community, a support system for its tenants.
“We wanted conversations that started inside the building to carry on outside of it,” said Mary Stargel, the Edney’s program manager.
The building needed some kind of central hub. Email wasn’t ideal: messages would get buried, and a master contacts list would become too unwieldy. Building-wide meetings would only go so far, since tenants worked in widely different time-frames.
The organization decided to adopt Slack, a messaging app that allows team members to carry on a variety of group and individual conversations via different “channels” – essentially, chat rooms devoted to different projects or topics of conversation.