Common Economic Development Terms

Definitions can be found at www.neogis.org/keywords.pdf.

While this was compiled for the Team NEO (Northern Ohio), it seems a good generic set of definitions.

Covers Business Improvement Districts, TIFs, and etc. Its value is as a "pointer" to more thorough discussion (the document has many links).

Thank You Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich, founder of Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC)and author of many essays of ethical pondering and proscriptive advice in education (Deschooling Society, for example) anticipated the deconstruction and ubiquity of informational systems as resource webs.

"Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree--public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available."

"Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators' curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:

1. Reference Services to Educational Objects-which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off hours.

2. Skill Exchanges--which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as modelsfor others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3. Peer-Matching--a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4. Reference Services to Educators-at-Large--who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, paraprofessionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients."

"I will use the words "opportunity web" for "network" to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. "Network" is often used, unfortunately, to designate the channels reserved to material selected by others for indoctrination, instruction, and entertainment. But it can also be used for the telephone or the postal service, which are primarily accessible to individuals who want to send messages to one another. I wish we had another word to designate such reticular structures for mutual access, a word less evocative of entrapment, less degraded by current usage and more suggestive of the fact that any such arrangement includes legal, organizational, and technical aspects. Not having found such a term, I will try to redeem the one which is available, using it as a synonym of "educational web."

"What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching."

Illych began the work which comprised "Deschooling Society" in 1967, and finalized the published work after discussions in Cuernavaca at Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) in November, 1970.

Now that's futurism. After 37 years, reality starts lining up with the vision.

I've relied upon Illych's "big ideas" in crafting my own educational path after attending CIDOC in 1974. Later, I returned to Illych's thoughts in developing technology adoption "models" for telecommunications clients and financial companies who needed to deal with what was apparent chaos but in fact celebration of the access and flow of information.

Thank you, Ivan Illych.

You know, the tubes of the Internet are challenging

Result from a Google search:

This is probably the most important area of your Meta Tags. Make this interesting, load it with Keywords or Phrases, and LIMIT it to 250 characters or less.

Book List / Recommendations

I've read all of these (maybe not *too* recently) and found them quite useful (by degree). Some are for skimming (like the subtle issues of 501 corporations....) but others have good staying power.


This list was first prepared by me as volunteer staff work for a "Main Street" community in May 2006.

To describe work with them as informing me of the issues in change management and organizational development... that experience rather resembles finding gravel in the salad.

Gresham's Law of Organizations as Restated by Me: Bad management drives out good.

Ok. Totally useless opinion but I'm feeling better now.

Clicking any of the links will take you to Amazon.com where you can read 3rd party reviews.

Executive, Board, and Administrative

Starting & Building A Nonprofit: A Practical Guide by Peri Pakroo
Very good basic information in the formation and management of non profits. I found the pieces discussing roles and responsibilities(e.g, what board members do, legal complications, common sense) quite applicable.

Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister
While written for engineering (software) projects, this has universal application in managing and creating effective teams.

The One Minute Manager Anniversary Ed : The World's Most Popular Management Method by Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson
I trained with one of Blanchard's disciples in the mid-80s. Good common sense on communications and leadership skills.


Development and Historic Preservation


The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series) by Jane Jacobs (Marion Library System has)

The Experience of Place : A New Way of Looking at and Dealing With our Radically Changing Cities and Countryside (Vintage) by Tony Hiss

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape by James Howard Kunstler (Paperback - Jul 26, 1994)

Edge City : Life on the New Frontier by Joel Garreau

Boomtown USA: The 7-1/2 Keys to Big Success in Small Towns by John M. Schultz

A Pattern Language : Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series) -- by Christopher Alexander (One of my personal favorites; I used it for training new hires in how to think about design and planning).

Urban Food Producers and Pondering

In Michael Shuman's Going Local, he cites (p.59) the productivity of urban growers:

"In Hong Kong, which has an extraordinary population density, nearly half of all vegetables consumed are grown within the city limits, on 5 percent to 6 percent of the city's land."

He works through Training and Development Corporation http://www.tdc-usa.org/about-us

More information on local growing, organics, community sponsored agriculture, and food for thought (heh) at AlterNet, in the piece Food of the Future which provides other references to local food systems.

Shuman's ongoing work gives the local food issue a useful context: that local food efforts involve also the transformation of local economies.

Campbell's Law of Everything applies: "You can't do just one thing."

For example, to develop more decentralized food systems, changes in local zoning may be essential enablers for local production to come to life.

Chickens, for example, were common part in the little Illinois river town where I grew up.

There was an "egg man" who visited each Saturday with product from about 1/2 mile away. And those who wanted had a couple of chickens even (gasp) in town. My grandma would get the garden (next to our house) turned over by a neighbor with a horse. The horse lived in a small barn about 100 yards from my house. The horse could find its way home from the bar on Front Street with the owner in (not on) the wagon. If the owner overstayed, the horse would go home under its own power.

How many things intertwined to make this happen?


This was in the 1950s through the early 1970s.

Things change.

Local food, local community, trade.... all forms of interconnected systems. Some of these systems are hugely dependent upon societal, policy decisions. Many of the food systems today suffer from the "unintended consequences" of regulation, which so often has driven to centralization and concentration of the markets and producers.

The cousin of the bacteria from the custard pie which sent the church elder to the bathroom for a rough night after the fundraiser now visits hundreds of thousands of families at the speed of a truck fleet and forces a national recall of the "product"; which, of course, is the newspeak for food.

Not that centralization, per se, always has problems, but centralization certainly always has consequences.

Rather than edit and tighten this up, I'll post and ponder.

Leads not to write

Live from the tubes of the Internet at Google News:

Midwest governors pass greenhouse gas pact in Milwaukee

Wisbusiness.com - 58 minutes ago
By Ryan Cardarella

Governors who signed a pact today to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses touted the accord as an example for other regions of the country and one that would establish the Midwest as a leader in the fight against global warming."

I think it needs a colon.

The Big Lebowski: Review

"Well, there's really only one dirty word in the movie."
That, from an English teacher.....

Thinking About The Farm Bill

The National Farm Bill's part of the defining "system" settings for how farms can innovate by virtue of "big dials" in the subsidy and tax mechanisms.

Michael Pollan, notes that:

"the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did.

The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. A result of these policy choices is on stark display in your supermarket, where the real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent. The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow."

From: New York Times Magazine, April 22, 2007
The Way We Live Now: You Are What You Grow
By Michael Pollan
Will this year's farm bill make us fatter and sicker?

Pollan goes into far more depth in his book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I found it a slog but a valuable reference piece. Very worthwhile writing, though, and I think it is a "must read" for the, searching for right word.... conversations based upon data rather than belief. You'll catch many of the book's key points in the above article.

NB: He snipes at Twinkies, but thank goodness he did not dis Moon Pies and RC.

When I read this.... I nod knowingly.... and find a door.

In a recently received status report:

"RIGs are limited National Emergency Grant (NEG) resources to assist local WIBs."

I like *so* want to know more.