Put on your thinking caps, go into active listening mode, and stretch out your inside voices, Washington Post employees: it's time for a good old-fashioned in-house daylong corporate brainstorming session. No idea is too wacky to win the $1,000 prize! Looking at you, Hipness Desk. So remember to RSVP for this big event, #PostDisrupt. Is it on Twitter? No, there's just a hash tag in the name. For reasons of #Disrupt #Journalism #Hipness #BobWoodwardIsDoneAndWeNeedSomethingBig. The full email is below.

From: Katharine Weymouth/exec/TWP
Date: 03/13/2012 02:30 PM
Subject: Resending Invitation to #PostDisrupt event - second part of message was missing

All,

#PostDisrupt Announcement to Staff

We are an 'ideas' company – in our journalism, in our products, in the innovation we bring to everything we do, in every way we reach our customers. Our success depends as much on the ideas that drive us as it does on our business execution.

Those ideas come from you, the incredible talent we have throughout The Post, in every department and at every level. Every day, our people come up with fresh ideas – for new products, original stories, even processes that might make us more efficient or result in a better customer experience. We'd like to do more of that, to cross-pollinate across the company and brainstorm in groups.

To that end, some of your colleagues are helping organize #PostDisrupt, a day-and-a-half, company-wide event to generate ideas and start building them.

We'd like to see people from all corners come together and think about how we can improve what we do. This is a follow-on session to two technology brainstorming and hacking sessions last summer. Both produced great ideas and helped to forge new bonds among our people. More importantly, they produced ideas we could act on.

That's what we're looking for again – ideas that are executable, are within strategy and will make us better. In particular, we're looking for ways to grow our digital business (especially our core users), develop new product ideas and sustain our print business.

Come with a half-baked idea and your colleagues can help to complete it. Bring an open mind. The concept of #PostDisrupt is to get together and see if we can generate ideas that will move us forward.

#PostDisrupt will take place over two days. We'll meet first on Tuesday, April 10, in the Community Room, at 1 p.m. Participants will introduce themselves, get ideas flowing and then break into smaller groups to refine their thoughts.

During the breakout sessions, participants will be able to team up and choose projects they'd like to work on. To make this a success, we need people from every department to take part. Jenny Abramson, Ashish Agrawal, Kelly Andresen, Sandy Sugawara, and Katharine Zaleski will be there to advise all the teams.

At the end of the day, we'll hear how the ideas have evolved and winnow them down. Some of the groups will meet again on Friday, April 20, to further burnish their ideas. By the end of that full day, the groups will present their concepts to a panel of judges, including the three of us, as well as Shailesh Prakash, Vijay Ravindran and Steve Stup.

The winning team will get $1,000 and some time to try to develop their project into an actual product or business.

If you have an idea you want to pursue, or if you just want to help out, we hope you'll plan to join us at #PostDisrupt!

Use the link below to register, and we'll respond to confirm your attendance. Note that our capacity is limited. If demand is higher, don't worry, we plan to hold similar events in the future. Please obtain your manager's approval before registering. The deadline to apply is Friday, March 23.

The organizing committee, featuring staff from across the building, includes Jenny Abramson, Cory Haik, Greg Lavalle, Greg Linch, Jane Lockhart, Andrew Pergam and Amanda Zamora. If you have questions, please reach out to them at: postdisrupt@washpost.com.

We'll see you there.

Katharine Marcus Steve

RSVP FORM: http://bit.ly/postdisruptrsvp

Katharine Weymouth
Publisher, The Washington Post
CEO, Washington Post Media

[Photo: AP]