So I went to see Food, Inc. at the Cedar Lee with a full house of foodies on Monday night. I recommend the film. It features Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and Joel Salatin and other well known (to foodies) folks. I had received an email invite from Brad Masi and I went with my farm collegues. After the show there was a panel. Brad was on it and some guy (who's name I cannot recall from Whole Foods) and Warren Taylor of Snowville Creamery in Pomeroy, Ohio. Warren was awesome.

There are certainly places in Cleveland where people very much enjoy our greatest natural resource, Lake Erie. To the East or West, rich or poor, it offers pleasures and potential, as filthy as it may be and shall remain.

Do the Port Authority and their planners from New York City have a clue what is the potential of our Great Lake and lakefront? Have you seen any good plans?

Are we doing anything close to what we should to protect the environment of Lake Erie? Is this the Bluest Lake possible, for this brightest greenest place?

Yesterday, I happened to be off (I work Saturdays), so I got to take it easy and enjoy the sights and sounds of Cleveland.  Here are a few images from the Ingenuity Festival, to Tregoning Gallery (featuring the wonderful Matt Dibble), and, finally, to Sokolowski's University Inn.  A great day in the city.

Since our founding, in 2004, REALNEO has become a groundbreaking free, open source social network of global interest – recently recognized as one of the top networks of our type in the country, by the Knight Foundation.

In 2008, the members of REALNEO.US formed REAL COOP, an Ohio legal cooperative, which now owns and operates REALNEO.US and REAL.COOP. We are unique in the world of social computing, and a global innovator in the evolution of information systems.

From the REALNEO.US homepage:

Thanks to Laura McShane for posting this morning a comment linking to Will Allen's "Good Food Manifesto" on his Growing Power blog. I, and millions of other people, became aware of Will last Sunday, when he was featured in the New York Times Sunday Magazine article "Street Fighter", but folks who follow local foods best practices surely knew of Will long before.

What You Say We Mean to You

I was analyzing the lay of the land around the Cleveland Cultural Gardens Sunday and thought I'd visit the region's most valuable real estate, along the blue shores of Lake Erie. Driving down MLK, I went through one of the few ugly mouseholes under the Freeway and traintracks thal block almost all reasonable public access to the lakefront, and chose to not go right, to where millionaires live, in Bratenahl, but left, where lunatic leaders have failed to extract a red cent of real value from our greatest natural resource...

Nominate a Woman of Worth, someone making a REAL difference in your community.  Win $25,000 towards your cause :)  Hello Gloria--I am nominating you!

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The latest unwanted "project" for Ward 15 soon to be Ward 14...information provided from Councilman Cummins (thanks Brian):

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As I've mentioned previously, many of my six years with REALNEO to date have been spent in pursuit of a core research question - that economic development and community development can become equated under a frame of quality of life and place enrichment.  This has been proposed previously and backed by many of my theoretical pieces.  Now, as I shift to operationalization of the theory, it becomes more important to request feedback and input from the variously communities

Today, for the first time in recent memory, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a balanced, forward thinking editorial about local government, corruption and leadership failure in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. It was written by Christopher Evans, who is a member of the Editorial Board.

Photo credit: New York Times

Dust off your Jean Jacques Rousseau NEO--Google "social contract" Cleveland, and, then, "social contract," Atlanta.

The game here will all start to make sense--after you PLEASE READ:

Atlanta Is MakingWay for New Public Housing, New York Times

Another attempt to spin off REALNEO...only with strings in all the right places...

Norm--Chris reminds me that it took Einstein years of working in obscurity to finally get recognition for his ideas...I suppose you should take the attitude that imitation is the sincerest form of praise, but these spin-offs are just that...spinning...spinning..around and around...to nowhere.

The movie 'Money As Debt' will be screened at the Beachwood Library.  Information on this screening is scarcely available anywhere on the web.  Find out more about the movie, here.  There will likely be a discussion following the screening of this thought provoking movie.

Excerpts from  the review of 'Money As Debt' at Populist America>

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Over the past 20 years, I've spent most of my "professional" time as an entrepreneur, with world-class expertise conducting multi-dimensional, multi-client relational comparative data and best practice analyses of any aspects of the world's largest and best global enterprises, environments and systems, and developing and consulting on innovations and total quality improvement. This work has generated a wealth of knowledge on large general systems, with a unique expertise in information systems and telecommunications. REALNEO is a product of this highest level expertise, drawn from the best practices of the best organizations on Earth. What REALNEO has developed for Cuyahoga County - what has been generated out of the REALNEO-generated Real Cooperative - takes general systems innovation to a whole new level of making us the brightest greenest place on Earth. So, we really do have a purpose to Cuyahoga County owning the Breuer, and the vision is beautifully expressed in this great rendering above, to be REAL COOP citizen headquarters of the open source capital of this brightest greenest state of Earth.

Speaker: Majid Rashidi, Ph.D., P.E., Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Cleveland State University Fenn College of Engineering.
Topic: "Harnessing the Power of Wind"

Program sponsorship opportunities available; sponsorship includes a table of 8 and signage.

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Theme: “Manufacturing Excellence: Innovate Locally, Succeed Globally”

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Join us the first Friday of every month for networking at the Bier-Markt. FREE appetizers and nonalcoholic beverages.

Parking available in City of Cleveland lot on West 26th Street for $5.00. Parking may also be available in the West Side Market lot on Lorain Avenue. Please do not park on West 25th Street before 6:00 p.m.
 

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Speaker: Chris Korleski, Director, Ohio EPA

Register online: http://www.cesnet.org/evtView.asp?evtID=182

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Thank you for your responses to our recent research inquiry, “What does I-Open mean to you?” We asked you for your feedback in the form of a bit of prose, a fictitious eulogy. We want to make sure what's important to you is what we're focusing on.

Thanks to everyone who contributed – each story guides us in serving community better and to be clear about I-Open touch points that matter to you. We’ve posted a few of the responses below:
 

Ensign Cowell, Tower Wealth

SEE the transformational economy in NEO for REAL.  Enjoy yourself and make friends.

The potluck will be from 6:30pm-11pm.

Please bring your favorite dish to help us celebrate with our Mother Earth in the passing of spring and ushering in the summer season

For more information about the workshop or potluck feel free to e-mail us at

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