The insightful and socially conscious civic entrepreneur Adele DiMarco Kious cooks up valuable vision for all in a recipe for prosperity posted to her Sicilian Soulfood blog - she surfaces a concept I hold dear, which is the value of developing a knowing and loving community. More than ever in our history, the American psyche is rooted in fear, but we have nothing to fear but living in fear itself. The recent natural disaster in South East Asia shows man is not in control of destiny.

Cool local artist and creative entrepreneur Bridget Ginley - founder W. 25th Street Buzz Gallery - has posted to her lake of consciousness blog, erie.effusion, some great concepts for better integrating and socializing regional brainpower to make NEO a more sustainable, quality place.

Ed Iannone's excellent Economic Development Futures blog (RSS fed to REALNEO) has an insightful write up and link to an excellent site featuring understanding of metrics/measures indicative of sustainability.

This web site is about indicators of sustainable community: ways to measure how well a community is meeting the needs and expectations of its present and future members. One of the primary goals of our site is to explain what indicators are, how indicators relate to sustainability, how to identify good indicators of sustainability, and how indicators can be used to measure progress toward building a sustainable community. Starting up an indicators project can be a bewildering task. From our experience in working with communities, we have found that everyone has the same set of basic questions. To help you develop and use indicators of sustainability, we have prepared clear, practical answers to these questions:

Pages on Dialogue and Inclusion in OSED - posting in progress

Pages related to Branding and Marketing in OSED - posting in progress

Pages related to Quality, Connected Places in OSED - posting in progress

Pages and material related to Innovation Networks in the OSED framework - posting in progress

Pages and material related to Brainpower, within the OSED - posting in progress

Pages of content, presentations and illustratives realted to Open Source Economic Development - posting in progress

This book coordinates deployment the Open Source Economic Development framework within REALNEO. The framework provides a structure for categorizing and managing the many Community Of Interest Links -COILs - of REALNEO. Ed Morrison at the Case Center for Regional Economic Issues developed the framework, and it is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

The Fund For Our Economic Future recently publicized insight from their first Minority Forum, which features a link to an interesting presentation from the keynote speaker, Dr. John Powell from Ohio State, on issues related to diversity and regionalization. Also included is a presentation from Ray Leach, CEO of NEO entrepreneurship supporters JumpStart, which expresses a commitment to be diverse and an interest to support minority entrepreneurs and help place minority business people in companies Jump Start supports. Page 3 of the presentation also says one thing that is "Different about Jump Start" is "We believe we can serve as a convener for all interested parties to build a social network". As this is a purpose of REALNEO, and this social network is committed to all parties in the region interested in entrepreneurship, it is clear we should all work together - we're all working with Case and dedicated to bettering this region. Time to start co-convening! Later in January, Jump Start is hosting an "Exchange", which should be a nice opportunity for local entrepreneurs to form physical connections... in the mean time, REALNEO will continue developing virtual connections and explore collaboration with Jump Start.

This book organizes all REALNEO content related to the development of virtual communities, serving as the best practices and planning lab for REALNEO and other social organizations optimizing technology for innovation.

An intellectual social reformer from Tribe shared the following posting that will have significant impact across America, because Martha Stewart is speaking out about legal process reform (from prison), and she knows the power of the Internet, uses it well, and is know and loved by untold millions, despite her legal problems. I post this message here because it surfaces issues we need to address to improve our regional economy - many of our unemployed are in fact unemployable for the reasons Martha highlights, and many of our more effective workforce development and reentry programs address this challenge - NEO must become world-class in addressing these issues, and use that distinctive competency to get ahead of the curve with social reform for this region, as America moves toward rebuilding our society as opposed to building prisons. Martha Stewart's Christmas Message: Prison Reform Now!

As promoted on the City Club Home Page - great deal!

Be sure to take advantage of our membership special during the month of
December. An individual membership is just $99, and family memberships
are half off. Contact Marcella Brown, Membership Manager, for the
discount certificate.

Speakers
> Senator Jeff Jacobson, Representative Claudette Woodard and Paul Marshall

Location

CAMP's Growth Tour for Manufacturers

Location: Spitzer Plaza Hotel & Marina, Lorain

Location

CAMP's Growth Tour for Manufacturers

Location: Windows On The River, Cleveland

Location

Jump Start Your Business featuring Doug Hall of the Eureka
Ranch

Location: Windows On The River, Cleveland

Location

REI Director Ed Morrison sent me a link to an excellent
case study that well demonstrates the value of ECHO - East Cleveland Homes
Online... this article highlights a Philadelphia program that is helping bridge
the digital divide isolating some of the most troubled households in that
region, and we need to do exactly the same types of things to gain exactly the
same types of benefits here - read this story and case study!

This issue is about to become explosive in this state as,
like in Pennsylvania, Ohio politicians are trying to legislate
protections for special telco interests that will take many options away from
communities trying to bridge their digital divides. Ohio is about to become the
battle ground (and joke) for the national digital divide war because a State Representative from Mount Vernon (near Columbus), Thom Collier, has
introduced a bill in the Ohio state legislature that amends existing Ohio cable
competition law by restricting political subdivisions from providing
"telecommunications service using telecommunications equipment".

I'm not sure whether this release got picked up by the local media. COSE is launching its annual business plan competition. Read more or visit the web site.

Business plan competitions are a good way to stimulate entrepreneurial efforts in a region. Here's a good article from McKinsey on the strategy. Read more.

Investing in business plan competitions would be a good strategy for the Fund for Our Economic Future. Here's how it could work. The Fund would challenge every college campus in Northeast Ohio to co-sponsor a business plan competition. The Fund would put up $50,000 in prize money for each campus electing to participate. That would require a commitment of about $1 million per year.

Each year, we would likely generate twenty to thirty good business proposals across the region. Some of these ideas will be small and focused on local markets. Others will be bolder ideas targeting higher growth businesses.

The competitions would deliver to the door step of other organizations -- JumpStart, GLIDE, COSE -- a promising set of business plans. In addition, the schools could commit to providing guidance and support to those who entered the competition but did not win.

Results would be clearly measurable by additional start-up investment.

Can artists improve civic behavior?

Here's an interesting article from the Harvard University Gazette about the mayor of Bogota, Colombia. He's a former academic and has been using mimes to encourage people not to jaywalk or behave irresponsibly in public.

A recent report by the Pew The Pew Internet & American Life Project explores the attitude of artists to the Internet. The surprising finding: Artists and musicians are enthusiatic Internet users and they believe the Internet helps them make and sell their work.

There is an interesting posting in Hindu Business about a development by a Carnegie Mellon professor working with academe and government in India to bridge the digital divide there, which serves all people of the world. Of course, where good happens first benefits first. At a recent Tuesday@REI it was proposed a solution for helping the disconnected in Cleveland is te deploy "dumb terminals" - thin clients designed to provide exclusive top-down solutions to limited problems community leaders consider important - whereas the Carnegie Mellon model is to provide the most functional, capabilitiy rich solutions to the most disconect people of India - the illiterate - to empower them at the highest possible level in the greatest range of ways. This is the correct model, and Case has the opportunity to help demonstrate the value of this approach as we work to bridge the digital divide in East Cleveland. Read on...

The George Gund Foundation today annouced major grants including $5 million for the Cleveland Museum of Art's
renovation and expansion project, a very exciting $1 million to Cuyahoga County's Invest in Children (IIC) initiative, and nearly $4 million more for 79 other programs that reflect the Foundation's continuing commitment to the urban
core of the region. This near-$10 million in funding brings their 2004 grant-giving total to nearly $30 million. "Invest in Children" is dedicated to Effective Parents and Families, Safe and Healthy Children, Children
Prepared for School and A Community Committed to Children... exactly what REI Director Ed Morrison and other community leaders recommend for insuring our long term economic development - read more and see links to that program and other related news and information below. Thank you Gund Foundation!