Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Realizing a Full Cleveland

We’re back and we did some summer reading.

One thing we discovered during our break was the news surrounding developments with OneCleveland. Dan Hanson wrote a great report about it in the July issue of Inside Business. He shared the potential for collaboration and distance learning, such as better exchanges of research between area health systems or opportunities to bring the world to the doorsteps of our arts institutions. This fiber network clearly offers untold opportunities for these regional assets to deliver a comparative_advantage that NEO has struggled for too long to realize.

An immediate thought of ours was that this fiber network encourages once unheard of collaborations between governmental organizations at every level that are struggling to do more with less. This network complements current regionalism efforts, such as Ohio Senator and B-W Prof. Eric_Fingerhut's mission to encourage shared services among city governments. Why not? This network can allow for better, faster exchanges of information so that scarce resources for emergency medical systems can be less parochial and more regional. This would save taxpayer dollars and help make the region’s tax structure less a barrier to attracting relocating companies or start-up businesses. Pretty cool.

However, before capturing our thinking in this posting, we looked to the NEO Blogsphere to see how others were interpreting this event and were discouraged by the old-style Cleveland reaction. Too many of them are bellyaching that OneCleveland doesn’t offer the wireless services they crave, which is unfortunate as not enough energy is being spent posting ideas that unlock the potential of our currently unmatched fiber network.

It’s our hope that the dialogue of NEO Blogsphere shifts its view of OneCleveland to seeing it as half full rather than half empty, as they can help all of us realize the full Cleveland .