Ken Warren and I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at the DeFrag Conference held at Lorain County Community College.
This is an Ed Morrison I-Open project. It is for bloggers, media, software developers, etc. A series of seminars and conferences over three days looking at the future, the problems, and discussion. People from Pixar, Disney, Urban Planners and more.
In the seminars Ken and I attended the running comment to us was, "You have it easy, you live in Lakewood. Everyone knows that you are working with a highly engaged group of intelligent residents." They would site the library, the schools, and yes The Observer. They all read the board, and download the pdf.
We are lucky, the residents and Observers are engaged. we have much to work from.
We can debate defining or building, the one thing I know the Lakewood Brand is getting out there.
I really want to thank everyone involved in this civic project.
I am hoping to post the Lakewood Observer presentation later.
.
On a higher note
Moderator: Jim O'Bryan
-
Jim O'Bryan
- Posts: 14196
- Joined: Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:12 pm
- Location: Lakewood
- Contact:
On a higher note
Jim O'Bryan
Lakewood Resident
"The very act of observing disturbs the system."
Werner Heisenberg
"If anything I've said seems useful to you, I'm glad.
If not, don't worry. Just forget about it."
His Holiness The Dalai Lama
Lakewood Resident
"The very act of observing disturbs the system."
Werner Heisenberg
"If anything I've said seems useful to you, I'm glad.
If not, don't worry. Just forget about it."
His Holiness The Dalai Lama
-
Justine Cooper
- Posts: 775
- Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:12 am
- Location: Lakewood
-
Jim O'Bryan
- Posts: 14196
- Joined: Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:12 pm
- Location: Lakewood
- Contact:
Justine
That should have read congratulations to ALL OF US.
The DEFRAG Talking Points - 3/12 - 3/14
The Lakewood Observer’s Hyper-local Dojo:
Self-Defense and the Ecology of Civic Engagement
“How the major stakeholders in a community align themselves to respond to broad cultural, social, economic, and political change, and how that alignment is shaped by the character and history of interaction among and between them, informs our understanding of the ecology of civic engagement.â€Â
- Marion Orr, “The Changing Ecology of Civic Engagementâ€Â
"All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it.â€Â
Paul Virilo and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War
Mission Statement
The mission of the Lakewood Observer is to attract, articulate, and amplify civic intelligence and community good will in the city of Lakewood and beyond.
Our goal is to help Lakewood residents and neighbors learn as much as possible about the city. In its efforts to know Lakewood par excellence, the Lakewood Observer will illuminate the many facets of culture, arts, business, education, religion, and lifestyle this diverse city has to offer.
The Lakewood Observer will capture Lakewood life in the present, imagine its promising future, and celebrate its rich urban history.
The Lakewood Observer shall provide a sounding board for charities, institutions, schools, children, families, events, and City Hall. We intend to open a space for long running dialogue with everyone who works, lives, or plays in the great city of Lakewood.
In this twenty-first century urban experiment, the Lakewood Observer will strive to construct for the city an open and unbiased ensemble of white papers for mapping community solutions, advancing responsible economic development and sustainability strategies, and tracking results.
Finally, the Lakewood Observer will invite the entire community to celebrate the vibrant mosaic of culture, nature, history, and personality we call Lakewood.
Goals
Create a municipal revolution in civic chops and community norms through a retro-experiment in Polis. That is to say, enact the myth of the whole community in the central location, i.e. an independent, economic, social unit with strict boundaries.
Reject anonymity, cynicism and neighborhood anomie.
Build from Jim O’Bryan’s “I Love Lakewood†narrative circuits for affectual barter upon the vertical mysterium and across the postmodern horizontal.
Serve the anti-individualist classical idealism of the Lakewood polis by producing civic phantoms more believable and more frightening than those produced by the PD.
Objectives
Commonwealth
Education
Moral Order
Play
Social Defense
Praxis
Dare to know.
Commit with others to face-time education and ecstasy through production of a community newspaper in the city that would know itself better than any other.ÂÂ
Join poet’s intuition and scientist’s scrutiny in an exploration of Lakewood’s conservative chthonic.
Execute through all species of collaborative psycho-geographic genius the poetic art of the dialectic in ecstatic time.
Advance across real and unreal Lakewood both rigorous deflationary assessments of any representation of social capital and wildly inflationary mirage making for any potential social capital.ÂÂ
The Mytho-Logics of Local Roots
LO advances through the logic of commonwealth, critical consciousness, deep image, mytho-poetic narrative, social order, territoriality and tribe the vision of the ‘Supreme Land†or “Holy City.â€ÂÂÂ
In a psychological sense, LO is a hyper-local and mythological recuperation of omnipotence shattered by the condition of pure war.
LO is intent on the recuperation of the image of Lakewood as center of the city that speaks to fresh water and resists regional immersion in the global techno-polis. ÂÂ
LO is a local roots civic engagement, reinvigoration and self-defense strategy with an economic development component designed for the global era of corporate de-localization.
LO envisions a robust ecology of civic engagement and hyper-local identity with individuals, businesses, institutions and political regimes each supplying narrative kernels and good deeds documented in the newspaper and on-line.
LO documents the good deeds of the tribes in territorial field of the city to create a sense of common ground and hyper-local sovereignty.
Feeling Good about Class and Community Organization
LO is a community organization effort that recognizes the culture of “pure war†(i.e. the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely) and mounts a defense strategy.
LO is a community organization effort that targets people, organizations and neighborhoods in the heroic effort to transform the affectual ecology of a street car suburb into the celestial register of harmony and love. The very simple goal is to make people feel good about making a concerted effort to increase individual and community control, political efficacy and improved quality of life.
LO is thick with locally rooted DIY working class resistance kernels, at odds with professionally operated and top-down advocacy and regionalist organizations that seek to dominate the civic landscape.
LO offers signs of hope in a period of economic and social challenge by bringing ‘I s’ into the fold of the hyper-local we.
LO focuses on embodied space and cyber space to advance new modes of civic membership.
LO follows a highly conscious and highly evolved code of civic combat and engagement.
Post-ethnic Press, Hyper-localism and the New Popular Front
LO is, in effect, a new popular front, deploying cutting-edge media production technology while embracing the moral residue of working class consciousness through hyper-local embodiment and resistance to corporate dislocation.
LO is a post-ethnic press with stem site production software designed to advance the self-renewal of the newspaper’s relationship to the people formerly known as advertisers, readers and subscribers.
Wall Street has constructed for hyper-localism a simple cost-cutting meaning, based on the challenges faced by mainstream media. The LO project radically challenges this meaning.
The focus of traditional newspapers is narrowing into the "hyper-local" in the effort to define a local brand and breathe life into the dead big city metro.
A battle of the brands is being waged between traditional newspapers, such as the PD and the Sun Post, and the post-ethnic hyper-local press like the Lakewood Observer. This battle will be fought over the means, methods and presentation of post-ethnic hyper-local imagi.
Executing through citizen journalism, the LO resists the imposition of a regional brand by capital, corporations and mainstream media upon local consciousness, culture, economy and politics.
The New Fundamentalism
Hyper-localism is the new fundamentalism of locality. The only true-believers are persons with skin in the game of the common ground.
Hyper-localism must be physical and territorial; it must be embodied through a palpable paper with enough gravity to go ‘clunk’ on your stoop.
With access to security and satisfaction threatened by pure war culture, there is no mercy in the hyper-local civic dojo.
The hyper-local civic dojo must defend and secure the city and its institutions, traditions and values.ÂÂ
As citizens focus on communications, control of food, and space, LO is constructing within the larger culture of pure war a hyper-local logistics and narrative of neighborhood survival.
LO is a populist, post-professional platform for community organization, storytelling and technological innovation that through hyper-localism resists the de-centering and displacement of neighbors from early 20th century neighborhood space.
Hyper-local cannot be meaningfully aggregated in a major metropolitan newspaper without damaging the ecology of civic engagement and neighborhoods. ÂÂ
The local community must cohere through words, images and interaction in order to define its brand and make its place meaningful in global world of diffusion and distraction.
If it’s not Lakewood; it’s Leakwood.ÂÂ
With critical consciousness, LO observes the activation of the fascism-paranoia pole (see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) - resulting from stepped-up indoctrination and colonization efforts of mainstream media, the Levin College of Urban Affairs, faith-based regional organizers, and real estate developers interested in collapsing seats of hyper-local municipal governments in Cuyahoga County.
Conversely, LO observes the activation of the anarchy-schizophrenia pole in the lone, nomadic egos of bloggers lost in the infinitely open source of virtual space and technological cyber-life.
As a form of hyper-local community defense, LO is at war with traditional media and commercial newspapers that sell the diffused nature of regionalism and evacuation of the demos of subsidiarity from City Hall.
Likewise, LO is at war with bloggers for atomizing and dis-inhibiting effects on the moral order of the hyper-local community.ÂÂ
As citizen soldiers become journalists for LO, they confront with hyper-local community character and concrete objects the atomizing blog-line of individual egos reaching for infinity in the global techno-polis.
Ultimately LO represents through a physical neighborhood newspaper the hyper-local endpoint for the blog-line of individual warrior egos seeking jihad with the other guys in cyberspace.
.
That should have read congratulations to ALL OF US.
The DEFRAG Talking Points - 3/12 - 3/14
The Lakewood Observer’s Hyper-local Dojo:
Self-Defense and the Ecology of Civic Engagement
“How the major stakeholders in a community align themselves to respond to broad cultural, social, economic, and political change, and how that alignment is shaped by the character and history of interaction among and between them, informs our understanding of the ecology of civic engagement.â€Â
- Marion Orr, “The Changing Ecology of Civic Engagementâ€Â
"All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it...War happens everywhere, but we no longer have the means of recognizing it.â€Â
Paul Virilo and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War
Mission Statement
The mission of the Lakewood Observer is to attract, articulate, and amplify civic intelligence and community good will in the city of Lakewood and beyond.
Our goal is to help Lakewood residents and neighbors learn as much as possible about the city. In its efforts to know Lakewood par excellence, the Lakewood Observer will illuminate the many facets of culture, arts, business, education, religion, and lifestyle this diverse city has to offer.
The Lakewood Observer will capture Lakewood life in the present, imagine its promising future, and celebrate its rich urban history.
The Lakewood Observer shall provide a sounding board for charities, institutions, schools, children, families, events, and City Hall. We intend to open a space for long running dialogue with everyone who works, lives, or plays in the great city of Lakewood.
In this twenty-first century urban experiment, the Lakewood Observer will strive to construct for the city an open and unbiased ensemble of white papers for mapping community solutions, advancing responsible economic development and sustainability strategies, and tracking results.
Finally, the Lakewood Observer will invite the entire community to celebrate the vibrant mosaic of culture, nature, history, and personality we call Lakewood.
Goals
Create a municipal revolution in civic chops and community norms through a retro-experiment in Polis. That is to say, enact the myth of the whole community in the central location, i.e. an independent, economic, social unit with strict boundaries.
Reject anonymity, cynicism and neighborhood anomie.
Build from Jim O’Bryan’s “I Love Lakewood†narrative circuits for affectual barter upon the vertical mysterium and across the postmodern horizontal.
Serve the anti-individualist classical idealism of the Lakewood polis by producing civic phantoms more believable and more frightening than those produced by the PD.
Objectives
Commonwealth
Education
Moral Order
Play
Social Defense
Praxis
Dare to know.
Commit with others to face-time education and ecstasy through production of a community newspaper in the city that would know itself better than any other.ÂÂ
Join poet’s intuition and scientist’s scrutiny in an exploration of Lakewood’s conservative chthonic.
Execute through all species of collaborative psycho-geographic genius the poetic art of the dialectic in ecstatic time.
Advance across real and unreal Lakewood both rigorous deflationary assessments of any representation of social capital and wildly inflationary mirage making for any potential social capital.ÂÂ
The Mytho-Logics of Local Roots
LO advances through the logic of commonwealth, critical consciousness, deep image, mytho-poetic narrative, social order, territoriality and tribe the vision of the ‘Supreme Land†or “Holy City.â€ÂÂÂ
In a psychological sense, LO is a hyper-local and mythological recuperation of omnipotence shattered by the condition of pure war.
LO is intent on the recuperation of the image of Lakewood as center of the city that speaks to fresh water and resists regional immersion in the global techno-polis. ÂÂ
LO is a local roots civic engagement, reinvigoration and self-defense strategy with an economic development component designed for the global era of corporate de-localization.
LO envisions a robust ecology of civic engagement and hyper-local identity with individuals, businesses, institutions and political regimes each supplying narrative kernels and good deeds documented in the newspaper and on-line.
LO documents the good deeds of the tribes in territorial field of the city to create a sense of common ground and hyper-local sovereignty.
Feeling Good about Class and Community Organization
LO is a community organization effort that recognizes the culture of “pure war†(i.e. the potential of a culture to destroy itself completely) and mounts a defense strategy.
LO is a community organization effort that targets people, organizations and neighborhoods in the heroic effort to transform the affectual ecology of a street car suburb into the celestial register of harmony and love. The very simple goal is to make people feel good about making a concerted effort to increase individual and community control, political efficacy and improved quality of life.
LO is thick with locally rooted DIY working class resistance kernels, at odds with professionally operated and top-down advocacy and regionalist organizations that seek to dominate the civic landscape.
LO offers signs of hope in a period of economic and social challenge by bringing ‘I s’ into the fold of the hyper-local we.
LO focuses on embodied space and cyber space to advance new modes of civic membership.
LO follows a highly conscious and highly evolved code of civic combat and engagement.
Post-ethnic Press, Hyper-localism and the New Popular Front
LO is, in effect, a new popular front, deploying cutting-edge media production technology while embracing the moral residue of working class consciousness through hyper-local embodiment and resistance to corporate dislocation.
LO is a post-ethnic press with stem site production software designed to advance the self-renewal of the newspaper’s relationship to the people formerly known as advertisers, readers and subscribers.
Wall Street has constructed for hyper-localism a simple cost-cutting meaning, based on the challenges faced by mainstream media. The LO project radically challenges this meaning.
The focus of traditional newspapers is narrowing into the "hyper-local" in the effort to define a local brand and breathe life into the dead big city metro.
A battle of the brands is being waged between traditional newspapers, such as the PD and the Sun Post, and the post-ethnic hyper-local press like the Lakewood Observer. This battle will be fought over the means, methods and presentation of post-ethnic hyper-local imagi.
Executing through citizen journalism, the LO resists the imposition of a regional brand by capital, corporations and mainstream media upon local consciousness, culture, economy and politics.
The New Fundamentalism
Hyper-localism is the new fundamentalism of locality. The only true-believers are persons with skin in the game of the common ground.
Hyper-localism must be physical and territorial; it must be embodied through a palpable paper with enough gravity to go ‘clunk’ on your stoop.
With access to security and satisfaction threatened by pure war culture, there is no mercy in the hyper-local civic dojo.
The hyper-local civic dojo must defend and secure the city and its institutions, traditions and values.ÂÂ
As citizens focus on communications, control of food, and space, LO is constructing within the larger culture of pure war a hyper-local logistics and narrative of neighborhood survival.
LO is a populist, post-professional platform for community organization, storytelling and technological innovation that through hyper-localism resists the de-centering and displacement of neighbors from early 20th century neighborhood space.
Hyper-local cannot be meaningfully aggregated in a major metropolitan newspaper without damaging the ecology of civic engagement and neighborhoods. ÂÂ
The local community must cohere through words, images and interaction in order to define its brand and make its place meaningful in global world of diffusion and distraction.
If it’s not Lakewood; it’s Leakwood.ÂÂ
With critical consciousness, LO observes the activation of the fascism-paranoia pole (see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) - resulting from stepped-up indoctrination and colonization efforts of mainstream media, the Levin College of Urban Affairs, faith-based regional organizers, and real estate developers interested in collapsing seats of hyper-local municipal governments in Cuyahoga County.
Conversely, LO observes the activation of the anarchy-schizophrenia pole in the lone, nomadic egos of bloggers lost in the infinitely open source of virtual space and technological cyber-life.
As a form of hyper-local community defense, LO is at war with traditional media and commercial newspapers that sell the diffused nature of regionalism and evacuation of the demos of subsidiarity from City Hall.
Likewise, LO is at war with bloggers for atomizing and dis-inhibiting effects on the moral order of the hyper-local community.ÂÂ
As citizen soldiers become journalists for LO, they confront with hyper-local community character and concrete objects the atomizing blog-line of individual egos reaching for infinity in the global techno-polis.
Ultimately LO represents through a physical neighborhood newspaper the hyper-local endpoint for the blog-line of individual warrior egos seeking jihad with the other guys in cyberspace.
.
Jim O'Bryan
Lakewood Resident
"The very act of observing disturbs the system."
Werner Heisenberg
"If anything I've said seems useful to you, I'm glad.
If not, don't worry. Just forget about it."
His Holiness The Dalai Lama
Lakewood Resident
"The very act of observing disturbs the system."
Werner Heisenberg
"If anything I've said seems useful to you, I'm glad.
If not, don't worry. Just forget about it."
His Holiness The Dalai Lama
-
Justine Cooper
- Posts: 775
- Joined: Thu Jan 12, 2006 10:12 am
- Location: Lakewood
Wow that is a mouthful. To me the LO seems to be the vehicle to help really save this city, make people aware of who is doing anything or nothing, and hold people accountable, give recognition to small businesses that other newspapers totally ignore, and also give a voice to the people. But I guess it is much more than that!!!
"Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive" Dalai Lama
-
John Viglianco
- Posts: 28
- Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:56 am
After wading though four page on the Seelie coup, I referred back to the initial article of that thread which mentioned a seminar about pushing the Lakewood and Observer brand.
A relative who is a councilman in Richmond Hts. made a comment to me over Easter. He was astounded at the participation level of the community in Lakewood politics.
I am more excited about the success of out community forums -- on the net and in print-- than the political slugfest. This is what is important in the long run.
However, I must admit that I watched three hours of SOPRANO episodes instead of one hour of NOVA on PBS last week.
A relative who is a councilman in Richmond Hts. made a comment to me over Easter. He was astounded at the participation level of the community in Lakewood politics.
I am more excited about the success of out community forums -- on the net and in print-- than the political slugfest. This is what is important in the long run.
However, I must admit that I watched three hours of SOPRANO episodes instead of one hour of NOVA on PBS last week.