The I-Open Backstory: A Tale of Industrial Economy Disruption and Spin-Out

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Image: REI Cluster Map by Ed Morrison & Laszlo Kosmon

From the Report: REI. Business Plan V.1.5 at I-Open on Scribd.

The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) is a 501c(3) not for profit educational economic development organization spun out (2005) of the Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI), a regional economic policy and report center based in Cleveland, Ohio from 1980 to 2005.

The Center was originally funded by the Cleveland US Federal Reserve Bank at the recommendation of a RAND Corporation report to advise the then many Fortune 500 corporate leaders based in the 23 counties of North East Ohio, a regional industrial economic success.

In 2003, Ed Morrison, lawyer, economic development practitioner, and policy strategist was hired as the Executive Director of REI, housed at the Weatherhead School of Management, Case Western Reserve University. The resident team led by Mr. Morrison, quickly incorporated legacy knowledge assets, updated and developed Center mission, generated a set of operational Principles, and aligned organizational investments with strategic programs in support of tech-based economic development in global networked economies.

(Note: Within 60 days of the time of the announced 2003 REI re-alignment, 60% of the Center's regional foundation funding provided by The Cleveland Foundation and George Gund Foundation was withdrawn; the remaining 30% funding provided by the Ameritech SBC Global corporation was re-dedicated by the corporate program office for the continued support of REI activities. Some 15 months later at the closing of the Center by CWRU in 2005, Ameritech SBC Global funds were confiscated by CWRU's Weatherhead School of Management, REI's host organization, during a time of organization and leadership disruption and financial downturn.)

In support of the REI 2003 mission update, and to catalyze and strengthen regional civic networks integral to tech-based economic transformation, team member Betsey Merkel developed the Civic Forum process, a pragmatic approach to civic engagement to accelerate the generation of transformational initiatives, ultimately engaging during the 17 month period over 3000 people "on a campus with no parking" - and before the advent of social media! (Costs averaged $.60 cents/person compared to a large failed regional engagement program averaging costs of $60.00/person, proving regional transformation for prosperity building does not need to be costly or complex in open economic networks.)

Simultaneously, Ed Morrison designed Strategic Doing, a rapid project development process to support, evaluate, and invest in the resulting Civic Forum entrepreneurial innovations for education, economic, and workforce development.

The Civic Forum process and Strategic Doing develop transformational civic entrepreneurial initiatives in Open Source Economic Development to accelerate prosperity for competitive regional advantage. 

 

Click Through For The Center for Regional Economic Issues (REI) Slide Show at I-Open On Flickr. [16 Slides]

The Center was closed by CWRU in June 2005. Ed Morrison was hired by Purdue University in Indiana USA to assist in the development of the Purdue Center for Regional Development, now a national and global hub for education, economic and workforce development and policy.

Also in June 2005, Ed Morrison, Betsey Merkel and two others co-founded The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) to continue the education and development of new practices and tools in Open Source Economic Development begun at REI.

(Note: Open Source Economic Development and Strategic Doing developed by REI Exec. Dir. Ed Morrison were later spun out in June 2005 and widely adopted by U.S. Workforce Investment Boards, the U.S. Economic Development Administration at the U.S. Dept of Commerce, and U.S. Dept of Energy to accelerate workforce innovation for regional economic development.

In Northeast Ohio, Betsey Merkel, REI Strategic Networks and Communications, and developer of the Civic Forum Process, continued to lead Civic Forums with I-Open colleagues and community to construct regional civic entrepreneurial networks and support resulting transformational enterprise initiatives.)

Ed retired from I-Open a few years ago to dedicate his work to the advancement of open models in workforce development. Betsey Merkel continues to invent and develop new practices and tools in Open Source Economic Development for the acceleration of transformative enterprise in emerging network economies.

Links of interest:

Building Leadership Capacity in Faith-Based Economic Development

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Shown L to R: Carlos Steward, Asst. Dir., Recreation; Lisa Braun, Executive Director; and Dawn Brown, Asst. Dir., Workforce Development at Ohio City Power with Lee Kay, Grant Coach and Consultant at Neighborhood Connections. Image Credit: Lisa Braun

Ohio City Power is an emerging place-based and virtual network that provides recreation, skills training and employment opportunities for the homeless and jobless at St. Paul's Church and Community Outreach in Ohio City, Ohio.

Ohio City Power programs strengthen community projects, relationships and collaborations for leadership capacity in faith-based economic development. 

2012 programs focus on:
  • The development of Ohio City Power projects to address neighborhood issues;
  • Encouraging new and stronger relationships between Ohio City community residents and local leaders; and, 
  • Supporting emergent opportunities for the development of community leadership, organizational  and community capacity building. 
Ohio City Power itself is comprised of a small core leadership network embedded in other supporting and evolving sponsor, partner and collaborating networks.

Open models such as Ohio City Power connect assets, talent and resources to transformative creative initiatives and business development for regional prosperity.

Ohio City Power 2011-2012 activities are funded by a grant from Neighborhood Connections, an affiliated program of the Cleveland Foundation and member of Grassroots Grantsmakers, an international affinity group for grassroots funders.

On Tuesday February 1, 2012, Ohio City Power leaders (shown above) met with Lee Kay, Grant Coach and Consultant at Neighborhood Connections to talk about how Ohio City Power programs are growing and developing.

Stop by to learn more, and contribute your insights and knowledge to improve this network of practice by visiting  http://www.ohiocitypower.net/ 

How to Create Your Social Media Knowledge Portrait

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Images © Alice Merkel on Flickr

Social business requires an integration of all we know to advance our conversations and meaningfully connect to both traditional and non-traditional employment opportunities.

The creation of a social media knowledge portrait begins by recognizing traditional work experiences, skills training, formal education, human passion, and emerging interests. 

A social media knowledge portrait is a method of organizing human knowledge and intelligence to:  

  • Generate a unique entrepreneurial knowledge base;   
  • Increase serendipity and connect to unforeseen opportunities;    
  • Diversify strategic pathways for sharing and collaboration; 
  • Inventory knowledge, expertise, skills and interest; and 
  • Connect knowledge investments to education, economic and workforce development.

Read more about how to connect what you know to new enterprise opportunities in the paper below.

How to Create a Social Media Knowledge Portrait

Civic Wisdom Quote - Gloria Ferris, Civic Leader and Blogger

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"We need to know that as we move forward in the twenty-first century of work we have to collaborate, support, and affirm each other."

- Gloria Ferris, Northeast Ohio Civic Leader and Blogger

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes guide civic leaders in Open Source Economic Development.

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

Narrative and images share a deeper, wider story of wisdom in the Civic Space - the area outside the four walls of any organization - where we are affected equally.

The wisdom of the Civic Space helps us to act in ways that build trust and respect, cornerstones of agile, entrepreneurial cultures.

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.

The CEPR Recession Waste Clock | Graphic Economics

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/graphic-economics/graphic-economics/the-cepr-recession-waste-clock#

September 28, 2010

The current downturn had led to the worst period of sustained unemployment since the Great Depression. This suffering is especially tragic because, like the Great Depression, it is entirely the result of misguided economic policy.

Unemployment corresponds to lost production of goods and services. Construction workers could have been providing safe and energy efficient housing to people who lack adequate shelter, but instead they were left sitting idle. Manufacturing workers, who could have been producing more fuel-efficient cars and appliances, are instead getting unemployment checks. Health care workers who could have been ensuring that people received adequate care and teachers who could have been in classrooms, helping educate our children, are instead spending their time looking for work.

This is an incredible loss not only for these workers who must struggle to make ends meet, but also for our economy and society. The CEPR Recession Waste Clock allows people to see the value of the goods and services that we have lost in this downturn. It measures the gap between potential GDP (as calculated by the Congressional Budget Office) and actual GDP.

Given the current unemployment rate of 9.6 percent, the amount of lost GDP as measured by this gap increases at the rate of $2.873 billion per day. This comes to $120 million an hour, $2 million a minute or $33 thousand a second.

You can also see the amount of lost output measured in units of houses, college educations, or personal mp3 players.

Building a COINs Strategy for Education, Economic, and Workforce Development

Collaborate: Leading Regional Innovation Clusters - A Report from the Council on Competitiveness, identifies three important components of 21st Century innovation based prosperity:

  1. Conversations 
  2. Collaboration
  3. Capacity

The Swarm Creativity Framework (below) is a tool to guide education, economic, and workforce development strategy for competitive regional advantage.

Swarm_creativity_framework

Taken together, the Council's directives, the Framework, and "Strategic Doing" - a simple process developed in I-Open to move ideas to action quickly (below), enable every community to build a COINs-collaborative innovation network strategy for creative, thriving local economies.

Strategic_doing

From the perspective of the Collective Intelligence Genome introduced at the COINs 2009 Opening Keynote by Dr. Thomas W. Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, this outlines the What, Why, and How - the Who, is all of us!

You can learn more about the Center's work at http://cci.mit.edu/index.html

I-Open is a co-sponsor of the COINs 2010 Conference.

COINS 2010 Coolhunting Academy: Skills Training to Strengthen Creativity and Collaboration

The COINs 2010 Coolhunting Academy document (above) offers background information for the upcoming Coolhunting Academy, a hands-on skills training workshop for entrepreneurs, organization, government, foundation, and economic development professionals.

The Academy offers an ideal opportunity to learn and apply new skills to "coolhunting" - the practice of seeking the most creative ideas and people - for the purpose of "coolfarming" - the practice of collaborating to help them succeed.

You will learn technical skills training and connect to new conversations with other like-minded entrepreneurs focused on advancing creativity as a driving force in regional economic development. You will discover new friends and colleagues interested too, in generating transformative projects and initiatives for enterprise development.

The October 2010 Coohunting Academy is presented prior to the COINs2010 Conference, October 7, 8, & 9, 2010. Attendance at this workshop is free for conference attendees; registration is $120 for workshop participation only. A three-month trial version of Condor is included.

Skill Set for the Ideal Condor user -- (note: if you do not have all of these skills ask your favorite Tech Geek to accompany you to work together!)

* very good computer skills, knowledge in a Web application development language (php, Javascript, perl, java), database skills (MySQL)

* and can be applied for organizational analysis, as in this case:

* sociology, psychology

* or Web mining, brand tracking, marketing, as in this case:

* marketing, branding, communication

Academy Details and Logistics --

Meet the GalaxyAdvisor Team who leads Workshops:

Kai Fischbach - Chief Scientist
Hauke Fuehres - Chief Technology Officer
Peter A. Gloor - Chief Creative Officer and Founder
Ken Riopelle - Chief Coolfarming Officer

DATE: Thursday, October 7, 2010
TIME: 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
LOCATION: Arnold Hall, 1810 Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia 31401

Take me directly to the COOLHUNTING ACADEMY REGISTRATION

The October 2010 Coohunting Academy is presented prior to the COINs2010 Conference, October 7, 8, & 9, 2010. Attendance at this workshop is free for conference attendees; registration is $120 for workshop participation only. A three-month trial version of Condor is included.

CONFERENCE FEE: Academic and Professional Rate: $180.00. Reduced Student Rate: $50.00.

Analysis / Elusive Employment / Special Reports / Current Affairs / ISN

The Path of Unemployment in the Great Recession

Unemployment line in memoriam, FDR Memorial site, Washington, DC

The current Great Recession has led to a dramatic rise in unemployment in the US – the highest in the post-World War II era – with rates expected to remain like this for several years to come. Europe has fared better, with work sharing helping to keep unemployment down – an arrangement that could help the US mitigate the acute suffering associated with several more years of the labor market crisis.

By Dean Baker

It has been two-and-a-half years since the recession officially began in the United States. While the economy has been growing for more than a year, unemployment remains near the 10.1 percent peak of October 2009. Few economists predict a rapid decline from its June level of 9.5 percent and, with stimulus being phased down over the next year, it is very plausible that the rate will edge higher in coming months.

The US, unlike most western European countries, is not set up to sustain long periods of high unemployment. Its system of social welfare is very much centered on work. This is most evident with health care. The vast majority of non-elderly people get their health care through employer provided health insurance. Individual policies tend to be very expensive, especially for people with any history of medical problems. When people lose their jobs, they generally lose their health care coverage as well. While there is a public program for low-income families, it doesn’t cover most of the unemployed, and the quality is often quite poor.

The same is true of other forms of public support. The US was never very generous to people who are not working, and it has become less so in the last three decades. That is why the prospect of a prolonged period of high unemployment in the US is likely to mean serious hardship for large numbers of people.

Worse than ever

The unemployment seen in this recession is already as bad as in the worst previous post-war recession, and it is almost certain to linger much longer. In the 1981-82 recession, unemployment in the US peaked at 10.8 percent in December 1982. However, the economy turned sharply upward at the beginning of 1983, and the unemployment rate fell back quickly. By July 1983 the unemployment rate was down to 9.4 percent, and it had fallen to 8.3 percent by the end of the year.

There is little prospect for a similar turnaround in this downturn. While the unemployment rate has edged down slightly since its October peak, most forecasts show the rate remaining nearly constant or just falling modestly over the next year and a half. Most official projections show the unemployment rate remaining well above its normal level until 2015 or 2016.

It is also worth noting that the same level of official unemployment implies a considerably worse labor market situation today than in the early 1980s. This is due to changes in the age composition of the labor force and also a declining coverage rate for the labor force survey used to measure unemployment.

The change in the age composition is fairly straightforward. In the 1981-82 recession, the huge baby boom cohort was mostly in its 20s or early 30s. The youngest were still teenagers. Workers at these ages have few financial and family commitments and therefore tend to change jobs more frequently. As a result, we expect to see higher rates of unemployment among younger workers. By contrast, the baby boomers are now mostly in their late 40s or 50s, ages at which workers very infrequently change jobs. Therefore we should expect a lower unemployment rate at present compared with 30 years ago.

If we look at unemployment by age group, it turns out that for every age cohort the unemployment rate is higher at present than it was at the peak unemployment rates of the 1981-82 recession. This means that on an age-adjusted basis the unemployment rate in this recession has already been much worse than during the recession that had prior claim to being the worst in the post-World War II era.

The aging of the population is not the only issue that affects the measure of unemployment. The coverage rate of the Current Population Survey (CPS), the labor force survey used to measure the unemployment rate, has fallen sharply over the last three decades. In the early 80s more than 95 percent of the population was covered by the survey. In recent years, the coverage rate has slipped to 88 percent. This decline in coverage would not matter if the people who are excluded from the survey are similar to the people who are covered.

However, we have good reason for believing this is not the case. The groups that face the highest unemployment rates (e.g. young African-American men) also have the lowest coverage rate. Using a comparison with Census data from the 2000 Census, my colleague John Schmitt concluded that the fall in coverage rates is likely to lead to an understatement of the unemployment rate of approximately 0.2 percentage points. This means that if we adjust for both age composition and declining coverage rates, the current unemployment rate would be comparable to an 11 percent measured unemployment rate in 1981-82.

Europe: From unemployment to partial employment

While the downturn has led to high and prolonged unemployment in the US, it has not had quite the same effect in Europe. Although the overall unemployment rates are very similar at present, the European average is inflated by the 20 percent unemployment figure for Spain, which adds more than a full percentage point to the EU average. It is also important to remember that the EU started the downturn with an unemployment rate that was two percentage points higher than in the US. This means that the recession led to a much sharper rise in unemployment in the US than in Europe. This is in spite of the fact that Europe has actually seen a sharper decline in GDP than the US.

One of the main reasons for the difference is that several European countries, most notably Germany and the Netherlands, have adopted a policy of work sharing to limit unemployment. The basic logic of work sharing is very simple. Under a standard system of unemployment insurance, workers are paid out benefits only if they are completely unemployed. In effect, the government is paying workers for being unemployed.

Under work-sharing schemes, instead of just paying workers for being completely unemployed, the government pays workers for being partly unemployed. In the standard model used in Germany, if a firm cuts workers hours by 20 percent, then the government covers 60 percent of the lost wages or 12 percent of the total wage. The employer is expected to pick up another 20 percent of the lost wages or four percent of the total wage. The worker is then left with four percent less pay but is working 20 percent less time. Since this likely corresponds to working a four-day week rather than a five-day week, savings on commuting and other work-related expenses may come close to offsetting the cut in pay.

Germany has been able to use this system to keep its unemployment rate from rising at all in the recession. In fact, its unemployment rate is slightly lower today than it was at the start of the recession. The Netherlands, which has also aggressively pursued a work-sharing policy, has seen a modest rise in unemployment, but its unemployment rate was still just 4.1 percent in the most recent data.

The success of Germany and the Netherlands thus far in protecting their workers from unemployment in such a steep downturn is a remarkable step forward in macroeconomic policy. It would be best of course to avoid recessions altogether, but if their impact on employment can be offset to the extent accomplished by these two countries, then it would be an enormous accomplishment.

In the US workers are seeing near double-digit unemployment with the implied loss of income and benefits, as well as the loss of self-esteem and social status that is associated with long-term unemployment. By contrast, workers in Germany and the Netherlands are adjusting to the falloff in demand with shorter workweeks and longer vacations. This is a great model and with luck it will quickly be adopted throughout the EU.

It may take a bit longer to see work sharing catch on in the US. While 15 million are unemployed, none of the people responsible for the recession are in that category. Economic policymakers are not given their jobs based on performance nor do they lose them as a result of bad performance. Therefore, we are likely to see far more suffering in this recession in the US than in Europe as the unemployment rate remains high for several more years.

Dr Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.

The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the author only, not the International Relations and Security Network (ISN).

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From Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Economy of Culture

Storytelling deepens our understanding of social and economic investment in a Quality, Connected Place, one of five areas in the Innovation Framework, a heuristic model of investment in Open Source Economic Development.

In this video interview, Northeast Ohio experience artist Melissa Daubert describes a collection of art pieces she created about her time living and teaching in Zimbabwe as a Peace Corps volunteer.

From Melissa’s story we begin to understand how culture knits together local assets to generate a dynamic hyper-local economy of established mores, the wisdom of traditional thought leaders, knowledge of project design and construction to ease daily living, and simple rules to establish trust and respect in the community.

These are important elements every neighborhood needs to identify and connect local creativity and accelerate the generation of small, widespread collaborative projects for local prosperity.