Ed Morrison, whom I have never met, yet is a glowing spot on my radar screen, will be presenting a program in the land of The Lakewood Observer July 26.
I-Open Tuesday July 26, Lakewood Public Library, 6:00PM – 8:00PM
“Reviewing Initiatives & Making Networks Work: Designing Process”
His blog: EdPro
I-Open:
To move toward our vision, I-Open will develop tools to assist civic leaders in implementing Open Source Economic Development practices within neighborhoods, communities, and regions.
We will use Northeast Ohio as our test bed, our laboratory. To accomplish our vision, we want I-Open, I-Open Partners and Northeast Ohio to establish a global reputation for regional innovation.
We invite any person or organizataion to join us as we acccelerate the economic transformation that is now underway in Northeast Ohio.
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It can be expected, should Observers show up, that this event might evoke an interesting meeting of the open source I-Open Economic Development model and the open source “Eye Open” Civic Development model, (the latter unfolding in Lakewood right now.)
I don’t know enough about Mr. Morrison’s work to comment smartly about this comparison. Still, from the Eye Open side, and in critical contravention of the materialistic worldview on economics, (economic man as predicate, matched with the ‘build it and they will come’ ethic; what I term the the medical model,) it is notable that the working assumptions of Eye Open civic development are: self, neighborhood, community knowledge without exclusion; and, development of the cognitive ‘chops’ which promote transformative intra/interpersonal and civic relationships.
Roughly the idea is to become smarter, more cognitively complex, more creative, and then to allow whatever economic development follows from this to be firstly ratcheted-up the evolutionary scale simply by its being nailed to a substantially more critical civic process.
If this sounds like the hidden agenda is to crucify economic man and redeem the innate truth in everyman…it’s not; it’s just a modest little inversion of the consensus paradigm.
