The Inner Circle has been many things - the Star Bakeries, the Hough Bakeries, a club, restaurant and meeting place - REALNEO Cafe when REALNEO folks are on hand - Snags when Snag is there - Gregs when Greg is there - Obama organizing HQ through the primary - hopefully soon the site of The Intergnerational School, and an Intergenerational Living and Learning Complex. Such reuse of this property in such different ways over time reflects sucessful adaptation of a location to changing market needs and interests - this is no longer a good location for the baking and distribution of cakes but is an excellent place for the growing of smart young minds.

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Just to make sure no boneheads try to make something about there being a bar where the Obama Campaign is organizing, there is not. There aren't any big places in East Cleveland that are available to assemble so many people every day, for free, so the Williams have been generous enough to open up their old Inner Circle space to the campaign, and are even making temporary repairs to the place so it is warm and dry, and they are feeding the troops free Hot Sauce Williams food - spending $1,000s for the Obama campaign to be able to operate. They got the cable on for the debate and just yesterday, they got DSL and I set up WiFi... and that changed everything. As five or six of us were sitting at Wifi lpatops and desktops working on the campaign or in my case posting to realneo the energy changed... the other people there... the volunteers... started asking about the WiFi and if they can bring in their computers, and asking questions about my website and Gimp and Ubuntu... we all started talking about completely different things than we did the day before, and we behaved differently, and we brought the entire Universe into the Inner Circle...

It was also the first time any of my EC friends had a chance to see what I do, like REALNEO, taking photos and putting them on the web - so I took the photos of Derreck and his friends and posted them real time to show them how fast and easy it is to create content online... and with open source and free WiFi, like here, it is all free... that is what I first came to East Cleveland to do, so yesterday was a breakthrough moment in my work!

Come by the Inner Circle Complex from 10 AM to 10 PM each day, through March 4th, and see what grass roots community development and campaigning looks and feels like this is an excellent time and place to become involved with making history, helping elect Obama for President and transforming the Star Neighborhood.

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