I wanted to take a minute to revisit what Ed Hauser added to the Oct 2008 Midtown Brews conversation, NEO Next: Chapter One "The Changing Landscape of Public Advocacy: Citizen-Community Priorities and Web 2.0"

Here's a clip from our round-the-room introductions...

My name’s Ed Hauser. I started this about ten years ago (working to save Whiskey Island as a green quality, connected public place). My background is computer process control engineering and I went to my first meeting the first public process ten years ago. I saw the processes were broken. Ten years later it’s getting worse and worse in Northeast Ohio community. We have the Port Authority who wanted, is taking over the Lakefront. We went through this Three Year Plan with Mayor Campbell and that’s in the garbage can, we spent all this time and money and now we’re doing it again. What I focus on, I have my opinions about what is important in this community…but I follow how the government and the business community run the processes here to develop our community. And it’s broken – completely broken. And that is what my mission is, as I tell my story, but along the way I try to inform everybody we need to do things differently but we’re going to continue to fail, we’re a failing city and if we don’t change things and people don’t get involved and really dog our public officials and leaders, we’re going to continue to fail, because the processes are broken.

And then later as the conversation got going...

Ed Hauser: A few observations and some experience. I’ve been involved in these billion dollar projects that are going to change the face of Cleveland: Lakefront planning, Cleveland Convention Center, Innerbelt, and some historical preservation types…and the way I’ve approached it is being a foot soldier, going to these meetings, doing public recording plus getting up and Brian Cummins probably knows me at City Hall and just being relentless. But, I don’t see a lot of other people by my side…getting up to microphones, writing letters to the Commissioners…so there needs to be a plan for getting foot soldiers out and really getting involved, going to the meetings. It’s difficult if you have a day job and if you do have a day job you’re burned out to do this so…but, how do you get this network of Bloggers from different web sites and get people to get to these meetings? To the bigger issues…and it doesn’t have to be a million dollars…just something significant, but that’s what we have to figure out how to plan.

I'd like to share what Ed's parting words were to Bill MacDermott and myself walking out of the October Midtown Brews: "Don't let this go. This was a good one. Keep everyone connected. This was the Kick-Off. From here go on and have followup working meetings about the things we all care about."

You can read the full transcription of the forum and watch the live broadcast here.