I hope you had a great 4th of July. At today's NEO Excellence Roundtable, we'll celebrate independence and freedom - core concepts of entrepreneurship, the new economy and the Roundtable.

Location

Here's a fast report on the opening of the 14th annual Community Technology Centers Network CTCNet. Read more.

Dan Gillmor
is a prominent journalist, author and commentator on technology in the
San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley), known for his technology
articles in the San Jose Mercury. He recently left the San Jose Mercury

For those who still don't get IT, an explanation for the evolution of Friendster's open source architecture should help...consider: "There were discussions of ditching open source. Should we just buy off-the-shelf software that would do what we want?" Pattishall explains. "We investigated the market but found there wasn't anything close to what we wanted to do, and it was way too expensive. We wouldn't be able to execute on any business plan because we spent too much just on the software." Read on...

WIth insightful perspectives from an information technology (IT) professional in India, the article below offers an excellent overview of the origins of Linux, what it is, where it fits in the IT world, trends in use, and implications on workforce demands. This is the perspective from India, and the global perspective, and the trends referenced are global, like Linux has 14 percent of the $50.9 billion market for server operating systems. Business professionals who do not understand these trends and implications risk tragic consequences.

03.29.2005 Cleveland-Marshall College of Law,
Today at 6:00PM sponsored by the Democratic Law Organization, Mr. Jerry Springer
discussed the national political arena as well as the regional economic development issues.

Each Tuesday from 2:00 - 4:00 PM REI holds REALNEO planning and
orientation sessions. These sessions are free and open to anyone
interested in this initiative - and excellent time to work with
volunteers on your Community Of Interest Links - feel free to come

Location

Each Tuesday from 2:00 - 4:00 PM REI holds REALNEO planning and
orientation sessions. These sessions are free and open to anyone
interested in this initiative - and excellent time to work with
volunteers on your Community Of Interest Links - feel free to come

Location

Each Tuesday from 2:00 - 4:00 PM REI holds REALNEO planning and
orientation sessions. These sessions are free and open to anyone
interested in this initiative - and excellent time to work with
volunteers on your Community Of Interest Links - feel free to come

Location

The social structure of free and open source software development - by Kevin Crowston and James Howison - Abstract: Metaphors, such as the Cathedral and Bazaar, used to describe the organization of FLOSS projects typically place them in sharp contrast to proprietary development by emphasizing FLOSS's distinctive social and communications structures. But what do we really know about the communication patterns of FLOSS projects? How generalizable are the projects that have been studied? Is there consistency across FLOSS projects? Questioning the assumption of distinctiveness is important because practitioner-advocates from within the FLOSS community rely on features of social structure to describe and account for some of the advantages of FLOSS production.

Today's Tuesdays@REI topic on "The Doan Brook Watershed Partnership" attracted the attention of many people and organizations, as the issues discussed connect to many important initiatives that concern water, as a natural resource and a source of positive economic impact.

[Picture (source) : Fishing in the pond near the former Mount Sinai complex at Rockefeller Park and Doan Brook]

Open-Source Practices for Biotechnology - New York Times,
February 10, 2005

Researchers from Australia have devised a method of creating genetically modified crops that does not infringe on patents held by big biotechnology companies.

The people behind the new technology-sharing initiative, called the Biological Innovation for Open Society, or BIOS, say that patents covering the basic
tools for genetically engineering plants - which are controlled by
companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer CropScience - have impeded
the use of biotechnology in developing countries and also in smaller-acreage crops, like vegetables, in the United States.

The Doctor Will See Your Prototype Now - Wired,
February 2005

The Physiome Project is assembling digital models of every system and anatomical feature of the human body - from large organs to tiny cellular and molecular functions.
The system would allows physicians to test various scenarios on your digital model - surgery, radiation, chemotherapy - and watch how your system reacts.

Below is a story about a company in LA that's doing exactly what companies and all medical service providers must do here - using open source VistA medical information management standards to transform healthcare. This is THE realization of the $125 million vision President Bush recently promoted here, and the understanding the Cleveland Clinic has embraced, and the certainty all other healthcare providers in NEO must recognize. Bottom line, if NEO's 100s of hospitals, clinics and medical centers and 1,000s of doctors get up to speed NOW, and collaborate, and turn their attention to excellence outside the operating room, and work strategically with enlightened IT professionals to embrace VistA region-wide, for the 4.4 million patients here, NEO will overnight become the global center of excellence in healthcare and the multi-billion-dollar medical information systems industry - for now, leadership, success, jobs and wealth go to some up-starts and VCs in LA. Read more...

At the January 21, 2005 City Club forum, Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove ended his presentation with his vision for the Cleveland Clinic leading the inevitable "socialization" of healthcare in America - he declared the age of private and small medical practices and hospitals has ended and large, efficient world-class healthcare providers like the Clinic will create a universal umbrella of coverage. He is correct, and Cleveland is very fortunate to have a world-leader of this movement here - the Clinic is just as able to be a world-hub of socialized healthcare as any other provider, and Cosgrove is clearly capable of leading NEO to the forefront of this global transition - NEO should be center of global healthcare industry and excellence - read the notes from Cosgrove's presentation to better understand how and why!

But the socialized provider aspect of the healthcare revolution is just one opportunity now before NEO - another was surfaced a week later with President Bush's 02.28.05 visit to the Clinic to praise their use of information systems to streamline and automate patient records - featuring before the world the Clinic's successes standardizing how patient records are maintained and communicated. To highlight this transformation, mentioned by Cosgrove the prior week at the City Club, the Clinic was not only able to use excellent medical information management to be the first providers to identify health risks of the pain-killer Vioxx but was then able to notify their 11,000 patients using Vioxx that they must stop taking the medication, literally real-time. Thus, effective medical information systems reduce healthcare problems, saving money and lives.

The pace of adoption of open source software is accelerating at astounding rates, as we see entire nations officially dumping Microsoft and going free. Recently, Venezuela switched to open source, and plan a university to develop programmers... now, read two great postings about Brazil - developing countries are wising up... developing Ohio is wising up too, as you'll see...

Happy birthday Drupal

I. REALNEO Status

A. Drafting of Legal
Agreements

1. Bill Vasu has JD from
Marshall in Intellectual Property and he would be willing to help with framing
of legal agreements, etc.

A two-part forum on: The Economics of Early Childhood Development

 Awareness: Session; One February 1, 2005, 4:00-6:00PM, Cleveland Museum of Natural History on Wade Oval in University Circle

 Alignment and Action: Session Two, February 14, 9AM to 12PM, Hanna Perkins Center for Child Development in Shaker Heights

Who cares about open source? The world's teachers, and countries, for example. Today on ZDNet UK there's a headline that could be about NEO college students, but is not - it's about some students in the UK, who developed an open source Linux operating system package for schools, which is also being embraced by nations and industry (and they're seeking US distributors, if anyone here wants a good second tier opportunity - see http://SchoolLINUX.com. How many open source savvy students are we nurturing here to be such innovators? And how soon will we at least use such open source innovations to transform our schools here, so they may better serve our students, so we'll have effective global innovators in the future. These are the brainpower challenges for our region to become a quality connected place for new economy development in the future. Time for NEO leaders to push these issues to the very top of the agenda to drive economic development here. Read how it's happening beyond our island...

If you for some reason like Microsoft you will not like this news, or the fact the world's progressive governments are mandating or expressing preferences for eGov development with open source applications and technologies - mandates include in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil,
Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, France, Italy and Peru - preferences include in Bahrain, Belgium, China and Hong Kong, Costa Rica, France, Germany,
Iceland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Poland, Portugal, Philippines and South
Africa - noteworthy is that "The Venezuelan government has founded an Open Source academy in the city of Merida in an effort to provide a supply of capable staff." Hello America, Ohio, and regional governments... are you serious about participating in the global economy? Better get open about using IT, and developing our workforce...

From Newsforge is a review of a site that may be useful for folks interested in the legal issues related to Open Source development - this site is from an attorney in Atlanta and it makes me wonder if many lawyers here in NEO are up to speed on these issues, and using leading edge information technology like blogging? If you know of such tech-savvy lawyers in NEO, post related information here - otherwise, I guess we can always go to Atlanta for our legal services...

Marc Canter participated in Steve Gillmor's December 31, 2004 Webcast on Identity Management and posted his observations on SXIP to his blog - this is an exciting evolution REALNEO supports... you'll soon see SXIP enabled and explained further here... for now, here are Marc's opinions:

The future of the Internet and social networking is being build upon a foundation of a "meta identity standard" - and our identity and lifestyle aggregation guru Marc Canter points out, on his great blog, "creating a meta-identity standard will be 2% technology and 98% politics". He goes on to propose "to nominate Dick Hardt and his Sxip Networks technology
to lead this effort forward. Sxip can be a 'mini-backplane' of sorts -
that can then plug into Kim's mega meta momma backplane he's talking
about. I really think it's possible that 2005 can be the year that this
all comes together." For REALNEO, we are integrating the SXIP backplane into our identity management system, as is so well supported by our CMS Drupal and our Bryght development partners' efforts, making us world-class compliant to follow the "Laws of Identity" developed by the Kim Cameron referenced above, which are included below. Thus, REALNEO users' social computing future is secure.

Over the past year everyone in the interconnected world started waking up to the value of Information Technology for individuals to transform every day life on Earth, for good and bad - a point largely demonstrated by the role the Internet and blogs/wikis now play in social organizations. 2004 saw a new dawning of enlightenment. And, overnight, a tsunami taught us that individual IT empowerment is transforming life on Earth for all, evolving us from isolated people and communities to an interwoven fabric of interconnected humanity sharing one planet with personal familiarity with the quality of life of all others.