I missed it, but apparently on the Lehrer-Mcneil Report, there was a section on increased individual participation in "journalism", or what they called "We Media". A large piece of the report was focused on wiki technology. Of course they mentioned Wikipedia. Apparently, wikipedia has over 2 billion hits per month. "Subscribers" to wikipedia outnumber the subscribers to the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times(and maybe one or two others) combined.

Can we use the Internet to develop a matching system for potential volunteers and volunteer activities at area nonprofits? After three years of raising money for University Settlement, a nonprofit social service agency on the southeast side of Cleveland, I am amazed by the good will and desire to help among the public. But couldn't we develop a system to utilize and magnify that good will? The following are my thoughts (based on computers labs in Chicago and the website tutormentorconnection.org, but business volunteers unlimited uses aspects of this as well), but I'd certainly welcome yours.

REALNEO just attracted our CIO Rob Hawkins (AKA Robataka) from Japan, where residents can get 100 M fiber connections to their homes for $40/month - that's more than 100X what we can get here... bottom line is our current "system" of a few telecom service providers is failing America and our community. Ameritech and the cable companies have no intention to improve things here any time soon, and this isn't OneCleveland's mission - we need new telecom provider strategies, thinking big, high-bandwidth, universal access, and forever. Who cares?

I saw this over at Cleveland vs World blog, but it appears there will be an meeting open to the public to discuss the various venues for the convention center. You can see more details over at Cleveland City Planning Commission's website.

Location

I saw today that Novell will be focusing on GNOME as there Desktop Envirionment for SUSE, etc. Being a KDE fan I was a little disappointed to see that. But in that same article, I saw a link to an item where the founder of Ubuntu, a Debian-based distribution almost soley focused on Gnome, in fact uses Kubuntu, a KDE focused version of Ubuntu. And that in fact that he wanted to see Kubuntu become more mainstream within the Ubuntu organization.

This "Storm the Palace" participant in a "technology" world cafe discusses his proposal to reuse abandoned, empty, underutilized properties for start-up technology businesses, putting the properties back into useful service, reducing blight, and at the same time providing much needed incubation space for start-ups.

Post thoughts and comments regarding technology facilitating Safety in NEO

Post thoughts and comments regarding Research and Development in NEO

Post thoughts and comments regarding Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology for NEO 

Post thoughts and comments regarding Biotechnology for NEO

Post thoughts and comments regarding fuel cell technology for NEO

Post thoughts and comments regarding change in transportation infrastructure for NEO

The Cleveland Linux User Group. The group meets once a month to talk about various linux and/or open source topics. There are also mailing lists to which you can subscribe.

Found an interesting article over at LXer (pronounced Elexer) which posts portions of what is supposedly an internal Intel document suggesting that they will anticipate to sell hundreds of millions of Linux computers in China. From the summary at the top of the article:

Post comments regarding the use of technology to connect parents to schools and make student progress more transparent

Post comments regarding how to best bridge the digital divide in NEO

Over a period of roundtable "world cafe" discussions, participants at the Storm the Palace table wrote the following summary ideas on a flip chart or post-it to the idea wall - each idea is being posted to the "Community Forums: Technology" on REALNEO focused on this category... read on:

Please post comments and insights regarding ways to increase participation in Arts and Cultural events

As dusk approached on a dreary, rainy Cleveland 1st of November, the skies suddenly cleared and around 80 diverse NEO Stakeholders gathered at the Palace Theater for a shared experience of insight from Mayor Campbell and Next Generation Consulting CEO Rebecca Ryan followed by "world cafe" collaboration. See the results linked below.

Around 80 diverse people from around Cleveland came together Halloween Night for a arts, culture and intellect filled evening of brainstorming and discussion on what we as a region need to do to make this a "more better" place, especially considering making NEO attractive to the next generation. Visit the links below to see the results.

Over a period of two evenings - October 31 and November 1, 2005 - around 150 folks from all walks of life and corners of NEO came together at two spectacular places - the Cleveland Institute of Art and the Palace Theater - to participate in "world cafes" introduced by futurist Rebecca Ryan. The response and outcomes were fantastic. Highlights and content created is posted in two books below:"Making NEO "More Better" at the CIA - October 31, 2005" and "Storming the Palace for a sustainable NEO - November 01, 2005" - more will be added for quite some time so check back frequently - the most important outcome is the development of ideas surfaced during these events, which are posting to our "Community Forums"... go there to participate in making NEO "more better" . To those who joined us, thank you so much!!!

Both Mayor Campbell and Council President Jackson met with the arts community last week.  Attendance was low, both at the Play House on the east with Campbell and Cleveland Public Theatre on the westside with Jackson. The Campbell strategy was to identify a top 20 list of reasons Campbell has advanced the arts, with art summits, expansion of live/work zones and public funding through the "1% for arts" set aside that is a part of public construction contracts.  She says her track record merits her return to office for another four years.  Jackson said, through his leadership, he deserves credit for these initiatives as well, and his record in council deserves the public’s faith and confidence that he will work to represent them well.  But what would be an election without an added dose of cynicism? 

It is critical the people and organizations of Northeast Ohio become effective working with open source software. This will support moving all our people across the digital divide (Open Source is free) and prepare our workforce to participate in the evolving global Information Technology economy, which is increasingly build with open source.

An insightful opinion editorial in the 04.15.05 New York Times declares "Bush Disarms, Unilaterally", claiming over the past few years the US has abandoned the new economy war. The author states what he "can't figure out about the Bush team is why an administration that is so focused on projecting U.S. military strength abroad has taken such little interest in America's economic competitiveness at home - the underlying engine of our strength" - ultimately the question posed is why Americans are allowing ourselves to fall behind the rest of the world in deploying information technology research and access to our masses. The same reasoning can be applied to our homeland economy for Northeast Ohio - why do we allow 100,000s of area residents to stagnate in the old economy, divided apart from the digital economy?