I-Open Civic Forums Build Collaborative Communities

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I-Open Civic Forum Process

Map by Betsey Merkel on Flickr

Civic Forums offer a new model of civic collaboration for a networked approach for economic and community development.

Civic Forums begin by building open economic networks to catalyze innovation and entrepreneurship. The civic forum process encourages new civic collaborations by behaving in ways that build trust, respect and accountability.

I-Open promotes civic behaviors that overcome fragmentation by focusing on shared interests, transformative business enterprise opportunities and pragmatic "next steps".

Civic Forums Accelerate Innovation in Education, Economic and Workforce Development

Innovation and Entrepreneurial Networks: REI.Tuesdays, a Platform for Civic Engagement

REI.Tuesdays

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2003 - 2005 REI.Tuesdays.-- weekly civic forums convened by the Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI) at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio engaged over 3,000 civic, business, government, and academic leaders from across 23 Northeast Ohio counties.

REI.Tuesdays civic forum conversations (Slide #2 above) address enterprise opportunity through the lens of the Innovation Framework - a heuristic model of investment in Open Source Economic Development (Slide #3).

The conversation matrix (Slide #4) provides an information infrastructure to underpin strategic scheduling and project presentation in the entrepreneurial community. Civic forums also introduce Strategic Doing - a simple, yet disciplined process to quickly move ideas to action (Slide #5) - and offer feedback loops for project work continuing outside of the regular forum schedule.

REI.Tuesdays is an example of how the civic forum process builds open economic networks for innovation to flourish and generates transformative enterprise for regional business development, human and organizational capacity building (Slide #6).

In terms of a model, REI.Tuesdays

  • Was funded by the telecommunications industry, SBC Global Ameritech
  • Supported by the Center for Regional Economic Issues, Case Western Reserve University, and 3000 Northeast Ohio business, government, academic, and civic entrepreneurs
  • Delivered social capital, web 2.0 platforms, local and global industry networks, generations of learning communties, and transformative industry clusters, and
  • Serves as a model for other forums, such as Fridays@The Corridor, Charleston Technology Corridor, Charleston, South Carolina and Thursdays at the House, Indiana Humanities Council, in Indianaoplois, Indiana.

The I-Open Civic Forum process is a successful approach to connect regional research and industry innovation for enterprise development in Open Source Economic Development.

Betsey Merkel, Co-Founder & Director of I-Open, is designer of the I-Open Civic Forum process.

References:

 

Civic Wisdom Quote: the length of our vision is equal to the depth of our passion

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"The depth and clarity of our passion is equal to the length and diversity of our vision."

- Jack Ricchiuto, Designer and Writer, DesigningLife.com, Cleveland, Ohio

 

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes guide the investment strategy of business leaders in Open Source Economic Development.

Quotes are taken from I-Open research, a library of instructive interviews contributed by leaders in civic, government, academia, and business.

Narratives and images share the story of wisdom in the Civic Space, the area outside the four walls of any organization.

Each quote offers guidance to us as we seek to earn trust and respect in our conversations and collaborations to build social and economic capacity.

You can learn more about I-Open Interview and Conversation Research at I-Open on Scribd. If you would like to contribute an interview about your work, please send us an email at info@i-open.org 

Images by Alice Merkel on Flickr.

Material is Copyright 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and contributed to The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), a not-for-profit educational economic organization.

COINs 2010 Keynote: Jesse Dylan | Most Creative People 2010 | Fast Company

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From the article:

Jesse Dylan, Director; Founder Form; FreeForm

"You could see the eyes of the people getting liquid," says CERN experimental physicist Maria Spiropulu of the crowd for a Jesse Dylan short film. The audience? Google's Larry Page, Tesla's Elon Musk, and elite scientists in the fields of astro-particle physics, cosmology, and dark matter. The film? Six minutes on the Large Hadron Collider, the massive particle accelerator designed to replicate the big bang and address core questions of physics. "The language of the microcosm we are exploring can be described very well with mathematics," Spiropulu says. "It is very difficult to make a picture or a poem of what we do. The film captured an adventure to discover the unknown. It is haunting and it sticks with you." More...

Jess Dylan brings extraordinary creative perspectives as Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs 2010 Conference Keynote speaker Oct 7, 2010.

I-Open is conference co-sponsor and supports the value Jesse's leadership in creative digital media brings to creativity, communication, and collaboration in Open Source Economic Development.

More on Jesse's COINs 2010 Conference Keynote:

Lybba - Unleashing swarm creativity to make open-source healthcare a reality

In his opening keynote, Jesse Dylan, award winning director of the Obama campaign video "Yes we can" talks about how his nonprofit, Lybba, is helping give life to the open source healthcare movement. Lybba's mission is to connect people with the community, information, and resources they need to take care of themselves and one another.  

Lybba creates online environments, media campaigns, and social experiments that forge meaningful relationships between hospitals and schools, doctors and patients, researchers and policy-makers. It takes an ethical and ecological approach to every challenge it faces. It combines media, design, science, and technology to make a difference, free for all, free of commercial interest. 

Jesse's ultimate goal is to bring together every patient looking for answers and provide a platform so that every stakeholder in chronic and rare diseases has a voice to create a community where innovation, empowerment, and compassion flourish.

Join us! Learn and connect at:

COINs 2010 - a collaborative interactive community Web site