Late on the 4th of July, there was a big fight in my neighborhood. Thankfully, I wasn't there. A friend who was there described it as around 100 people - some from East Cleveland and some from Cleveland - who just plain wanted to fight. No gang or drug issues - no girl in the middle - just a bunch of people so stressed and freaked out by life that they needed to pound somebody. On that night, those folks settled for pounding each other, and little harm was caused.

So I went to see Food, Inc. at the Cedar Lee with a full house of foodies on Monday night. I recommend the film. It features Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and Joel Salatin and other well known (to foodies) folks. I had received an email invite from Brad Masi and I went with my farm collegues. After the show there was a panel. Brad was on it and some guy (who's name I cannot recall from Whole Foods) and Warren Taylor of Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, Ohio. Warren was awesome.

Yesterday, I happened to be off (I work Saturdays), so I got to take it easy and enjoy the sights and sounds of Cleveland.  Here are a few images from the Ingenuity Festival, to Tregoning Gallery (featuring the wonderful Matt Dibble), and, finally, to Sokolowski's University Inn.  A great day in the city.

Since our founding, in 2004, REALNEO has become a groundbreaking free, open source social network of global interest – recently recognized as one of the top networks of our type in the country, by the Knight Foundation.

In 2008, the members of REALNEO.US formed REAL COOP, an Ohio legal cooperative, which now owns and operates REALNEO.US and REAL.COOP. We are unique in the world of social computing, and a global innovator in the evolution of information systems.

From the REALNEO.US homepage:

Thanks to Laura McShane for posting this morning a comment linking to Will Allen's "Good Food Manifesto" on his Growing Power blog. I, and millions of other people, became aware of Will last Sunday, when he was featured in the New York Times Sunday Magazine article "Street Fighter", but folks who follow local foods best practices surely knew of Will long before.

I was analyzing the lay of the land around the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Sunday and thought I'd visit the region's most valuable real estate, along the blue shores of Lake Erie. Driving down MLK, I went through one of the few ugly mouseholes under the Freeway and traintracks thal block almost all reasonable public access to the lakefront, and chose to not go right, to where millionaires live, in Bratenahl, but left, where lunatic leaders have failed to extract a red cent of real value from our greatest natural resource...

Nominate a Woman of Worth, someone making a REAL difference in your community.  Win $25,000 towards your cause :)  Hello Gloria--I am nominating you!

As I've mentioned previously, many of my six years with REALNEO to date have been spent in pursuit of a core research question - that economic development and community development can become equated under a frame of quality of life and place enrichment.  This has been proposed previously and backed by many of my theoretical pieces.  Now, as I shift to operationalization of the theory, it becomes more important to request feedback and input from the variously communities

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Photo credit: New York Times

Dust off your Jean Jacques Rousseau NEO--Google "social contract" Cleveland, and, then, "social contract," Atlanta.

The game here will all start to make sense--after you PLEASE READ:

Atlanta Is MakingWay for New Public Housing, New York Times

Another attempt to spin off REALNEO...only with strings in all the right places...

Norm--Chris reminds me that it took Einstein years of working in obscurity to finally get recognition for his ideas...I suppose you should take the attitude that imitation is the sincerest form of praise, but these spin-offs are just that...spinning...spinning..around and around...to nowhere.

Over the past 20 years, I've spent most of my "professional" time as an entrepreneur, with world-class expertise conducting multi-dimensional, multi-client relational comparative data and best practice analyses of any aspects of the world's largest and best global enterprises, environments and systems, and developing and consulting on innovations and total quality improvement. This work has generated a wealth of knowledge on large general systems, with a unique expertise in information systems and telecommunications. REALNEO is a product of this highest level expertise, drawn from the best practices of the best organizations on Earth. What REALNEO has developed for Cuyahoga County - what has been generated out of the REALNEO-generated Real Cooperative - takes general systems innovation to a whole new level of making us the brightest greenest place on Earth. So, we really do have a purpose to Cuyahoga County owning the Breuer, and the vision is beautifully expressed in this great rendering above, to be REAL COOP citizen headquarters of the open source capital of this brightest greenest state of Earth.

Speaker: Majid Rashidi, Ph.D., P.E., Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Cleveland State University Fenn College of Engineering.
Topic: "Harnessing the Power of Wind"

Program sponsorship opportunities available; sponsorship includes a table of 8 and signage.

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Theme: “Manufacturing Excellence: Innovate Locally, Succeed Globally”

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Join us the first Friday of every month for networking at the Bier-Markt. FREE appetizers and nonalcoholic beverages.

Parking available in City of Cleveland lot on West 26th Street for $5.00. Parking may also be available in the West Side Market lot on Lorain Avenue. Please do not park on West 25th Street before 6:00 p.m.
 

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It's an interesting experiment, live blogging from the final dress rehearsal of Verdi's opera "Fallstaff.  We've been promised full access - backstage, the house, conversations with staff and actors (as long as they are willing), but for now, The stage manager’s called “places, five minutes”, so I’m going off to the seats. I don’t want to miss anything. 

SEE the transformational economy in NEO for REAL.  Enjoy yourself and make friends.

The potluck will be from 6:30pm-11pm.

Please bring your favorite dish to help us celebrate with our Mother Earth in the passing of spring and ushering in the summer season

For more information about the workshop or potluck feel free to e-mail us at

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 During these tough economic times, libraries provide vital information resources--on the flip side, we must evidence fiscal transparency and efficiency.

Tremont Communicator is now out for distribution.  I won't harp on CDCs and the mailing list issue.  Everyone deserves a chance to have their say.

Look for the signs.  Every Saturday in Old Brooklyn, there is a hive of activity here.

Please mark your calendars for this worthwhile event.  Print and distribute.

Spam alert.  I am going to promote the recently released travel guide to Cleveland by Douglas Trattner and published by www.moon.com.