Hi Marc,

Looks like you've had your head in geekville for a while and been mucho successful. I am no geek, in fact I am further toward the xenophobic grandma I believe I heard you describe in one of the many pages of posts I've been reading. So many incomprehensible acronyms! My head is swimming.

But to your request for feedback: Getting machines to the people - do you mean like one laptop per child? I mean, dude in Clevehoga we're sorta like a holler in WV as far as technology. So when you say - "the right people", I hope you mean the poor. There's been plenty of discussion of the "wrong people" here in realNEO, but they all have computers (uh except our sheriff). Will these machines come with opensource software? (ooo, not Windows Vista I presume). So a kid in an underprivileged Cleveland neighborhood gets a laptop with Ubuntu running on Linux with open office and a dashboard and this laptop comes with a warranty and training? So you save on the software, but the machines - costly, eh? How do those get distributed and who pays for the training and the machines? Do they get handed out via schools? Do senior centers get one per senior? What's the deployment plan? And who are the "right people"? For people who already have a machine do you offer just dashboard or dashboard and FOSS with training? Is there a fee to the individual for the training? Is it done in workshops at local libraries or community centers or only online via video help? Sliding scale like Planned Parenthood or CityFresh?

I like the content aggregator and the connectivity - the individual can choose how much, right? What about editing that dashboard. Let's say I want my current job's website on my dashboard - so I what, friend them? Or do I just favorite them, get their feed? Then the sons of bitches lay me off - now I delete them - does it hurt? Do they know? Or perhaps, if they know do they care? I mean this is social, right, but it goes beyond the social of say a facebook relationship right? Remember, you're talking to someone who barely knows how all this works currently, but I am educable.

Yes, we all need organization and could be more successful if more people knew about the amazing stuff available via the www, but that's gonna be a lotta lotta training.

Let's see - as a xenophobic grandma (I'm not really a grandma yet and not xenophobic, just supicious and cynical from living in Clevehoga for 30 years), I am facebooked, linkedin, I'm a blogger on realneo, I visit NYTimes and our local fishwrap and a few other local sites daily, I bank online, if I ever needed a doctor, I'd want to check on my test results after an exam online. I hardly buy anything (except food), but sometimes I shop for local concert tix in other localities for gifts. I google research. I am interested in local issues like the port authority and local government hornswaggling. I want my PIRG (Public Interest Research Group) alerts. I want to know where my stimulus dollars are going currently. There's surely more I'm not thinking of right now. You're saying that I can have all this stuff in one dashboard when I press go on my dashboard? Cool. And then "friends" would know that I am connected to these sites - sort of like when you go to someone's house and look at their bookshelf to determine stuff about them by what they read? But I can somehow control what people know about me by making this or that "public" or not? My friend would fuhshizzle want her dating site on her dashboard, but might not want others to know she's a member at online booty call (like her employer), right? Oh and would this be deployable in offices who "control" what sites their employees visit?

Can someone have two identities? The slouch and the business professional? You know the shit about parents on FB, right? "Ahem, son, I saw you hitting that bong in you friend's FB album today... lay off the weed and hit the books ferchrissake!"

Would this also provide a sort of network mapping - i.e. if I connected to someone who goes down in a corruption probe, would the FBI want to interview me? If you're paying attention at all to NEO, you know that we rival Chicago as far as graft and corruption go.

For others reading this thread, this outline helped me a lot - DiSO outline.

That's enough for now. I'll await your reply. Hope you're having a swell time out there in Cali. Come to NEO sometime. It's not all bad and the wintryness of weather is subsiding. It's actually quite beautiful here 9 months out of the year.

Oh and as to the title of this post - we do recommend that if you're planning an investment in Cuyahoga County that you visit in person. We'll show you around. It's not LA, nor SF. There are holes in the streets and in the watermains. There's lots of old stick in the mud corporate mentality, stuck in the past money influence, too. There are lots of bad cowboys and a few whitehats. Don't come armed - there are plenty of arms here. Since you know Norm, you'll surely land in the embrace (arms) of the whitehats, but he and we can show you the needy, wanting arms, cause their everywhere.

If you're really a red diaper baby, Cuyahoga County is a great place to launch. Why go to NYC or Dubai with this stuff when you can do good right here in Hooterville where the rich get richer and the poor stay poor, right? Welcome to the realNEO, Marc.

I actually found Marc. In 2004, when I was based in the SF area working on the research and development behind REALNEO and REAL COOP INFO.

My architecture needed a Citizen Dashboard to meet the needs of citizens of a region - I was dedicated to helping Northeast Ohio transform our economy through world-class Information Technology. In my research I identified core visionaries of multimedia, open source and social computing and Marc Canter is "the man".

We became friends on what was then a remarkable social network - TRIBE.COM:

Norm on Tribe: http://people.tribe.net/normroulet

Marc on Tribe: http://people.tribe.net/marccanter

This is still a valuable archive of some of my California development work, and perspectives on NEO from CA... especially "CAUSE for Cleveland" - "Calling All University School Entrepreneurs for Cleveland"... which on January 14, 2004 became: "CAUSE - for community renewal and economic development in the industrial heartland of Northeast Ohio - for everyone who wants to help rebuild a great city... from entrepreneurs to urban planners!"... http://clevelandcause.tribe.net

Visit the Tribe site here... not really active since I launched REALNEO... to see TRIBE and some interesting documentation of the origins of REALNEO.

Interesting postings from the birth of the whole "Regionalism" diversion:

Birth here... http://clevelandcause.tribe.net/thread/696a3ff7-0406-48c1-b233-ed558a9270ce

More analyses here: http://clevelandcause.tribe.net/thread/ef118354-8294-4a1e-a332-6f31eaa4121f

Interesting historical perspectives on Case and origins of REI, and hiring of Ed Morrison, here - http://clevelandcause.tribe.net/thread/8f543700-cafa-4664-966d-fdca6a163161

Between awareness created by direct CAUSE outreach and this early economic development social computing community on Tribe, I was "recruited" back to Northeast Ohio to launch REALNEO here... and that is making history here now.

When it was time to set up REALNEO.US, I worked with Marc to identify the best then-current social computing platform, and we chose Drupal - Marc connected me with Bryght, and within hours REALNEO was alive.

Nobody has been able to kill us since!

Node 1 - http://realneo.us/node/1 - Day 1 - November 7, 2004 - is titled:

REALNEO Development Plan

Node 2 - http://realneo.us/node/2 - Day 1 - November 7, 2004... minute 6:

What is the basic idea of REALNEO?... explains:

"To accomplish this goal, a team of experts has assembled. The team includes Marc Canter, a San Francisco expert in social networking, Boris Mann, a Vancouver, BC, expert in Drupal, and Ed Morrison, the Executive Director of CWRU's Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI). Other experts will be added as the project strategy and scope becomes more clearly defined."

I introduce Marc further to the REALNEO community on Day 7 - November 14, 2004 - Node 41.

And I have been on-plan and kept everything well documented on realneo and everywhere I work, all along, so feel free to learn more about the history of this remakable, world-class initiative.

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Jeff - Preamble.

This is the foundation of an open social computing development initiative - a $10+ million collaboration of the public, private sector and government - we propose will create jobs and economic activity while integrating multiple sources of dala and users.

REALNEO may be as little as a Drupal site integrated with all other Drupal sites into a centralized, individually owned and managed datawarehouse, accessed by some citizens via Citizen Dashboard... in any case all this costs "REALNEO" nothing, as realneo is just a network among networks.

Realneo members may move into the core technology, in which case people involved with REALNEO may chose to become actively involved in the development of the datawarehouse and Citizen Dashboard... how the "barnd" is used is I suppose up to the membership/coop... I do not own that.

That is for realneo members to decide - ultimately it is participants in a social network who determine where they want to spend their time. All such things are opt in, unless government requires using a certain data system, like registering for Medicaid.

The datawarehouse model must have a sort of public ownership model as the entire concept is that not one man may own the data of all others, as is the case today with credit reporting services (three), for example.

The data management entity may be REAL COOP or another coop - REAL COOP just happens to exist so it is possible to use that for this purpose.

Marc/BroadbandMechanics are private experts working on the bigger $10+ million open social computing development initiative and their services will be negotiated as the scope of the initiative becomes more clear. He has proposed budgets.

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REALNEO works just fine.

It is everything else that appears broken.

PD... broken beyond repair.

What's a Crain's

What Citizen Dashboard?

Giga to Hessler?!?!?! Please.

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