blog (January, 2007)
ISO: guided wellness
I need a new dentist and general practitioner.
Would you suggest anyone?
I haven't had a dentist appointment since I moved to Cleveland ~4 years ago. The ridges formed at the base of my lower premolars/molars look to be storing coffee nicely for a winter emergency, but are becoming worrisome. It's time.
My doctor lives some 10 miles away -- not a quick bike-hop from work -- and is too cold and condemning; makes me not want to go. (So I don't.)
If you know of a good dentist and/or GP/PCP not too far from downtown Cleveland, please drop a comment!
Urban Harvest Garden Tour 2007
Saturday was one of those adventure days I enjoy so much.
I bicycled to eight gardens on the Urban Harvest Garden Tour. Met good people doing good work, transforming (mostly-)urban lots into fertile vegetable gardens, to feed themselves, their families, and their communities.
Re-learning, teaching, growing.
Some (like the Barkwill/Doloff Community Garden, above,) are transformations of once abandoned lots.
The community garden maintainers I spoke with seemed less interested in expanding their own gardens than in suggesting that Clevelanders interested in doing the same:
- find an abandoned lot in their hood,
- ask their councilperson to support its reclamation, and
- get started, with help from Summer Sprout:
Summer Sprout is a collaborative effort between OSU Extension and Cleveland, through the Division of Neighborhood Services, Department of Community Development. Community gardens registered with Summer Sprout receive vegetable seeds and plant starts, soil preparation services such as plowing and rototilling, assistance in getting fire hydrant permits and equipment for watering, and garden fertilizer and leaf humus.
Growers keep their vegetables for themselves or to share. The rest of the produce goes to area hunger centers and agencies.
For details, 216-429-8246.
-- Community gardening sprouting up all the time in the Cleveland area (The Plain Dealer)
To know that Summer Sprout consists of some 170 gardens in Cleveland is inspiring. To see just a few of them and meet the people behind them, even moreso.
I've put all the photos I took in a set on Flickr: Urban Harvest Community Garden Tour 2007. The descriptions list which garden they're from, and each photo's location is geo-tagged; look for the map link.
4415 Euclid recycles
Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center finally has a City recycling dumpster. :)
It was over a year ago that John McGovern referred me to Cassandra Moore, (Project Director for the City of Cleveland's Division of Waste Collection,) to request a city recycling dumpster in my workspace parking lot.
Our building owners and management were open and enthusiastic, (thanks, Michael Fleming, Heartland Developers, 4415 Euclid LLC.) Being publicly accessible 24/7 by Euclid and Chester made our location an easy sell to the City, we just had to wait on the new containers to arrive and be painted. A year of predictions, postponement, recontacting.
I've been collecting recyclables in the CleveMed kitchen for a few years -- in cardboard boxes from the water jugs we'd buy -- and toting them to City dumpsters every couple weeks. Until I'd drive my car to work, the filled boxes would stack to form a wall next to my cube, and the heap in the kitchen would tend toward constant overflow, pissing off the germ-paranoid.
Great, then, to return from California this week and find that our dumpster had finally arrived, and that the company switched from gallon jug shipments to a tap-water purifier.
An opportunity for us to collect more materials. Get some real bins, better publicize, and (hopefully) have the cleaning crew take the recyclables out with the trash. That's less crushing, stacking, and transporting for me.
I've added this to the Cleveland Recycling Locations Map (about).
ingenuity: progression, projection
Cleveland's 3rd annual Ingenuity Festival is already a week past, and I haven't yet squeaked about it here. I wrote half an entry the week prior, intending to promote the fest and my part in it, but I was too tangled and busy preparing, and left it undone.
In Ingenuity's first year, I walked through the festival a few times and paused for some music. I spent a lot of time at last year's 2.0, digging great music/dance (DJ Spooky and SAFMOD beat me up,) art installations, and goodfun (get-down in the rain,) and did a brief Capoeira performance with Shakthi and Taliesin on stage with Moises Borges and his band.
This year we made a somewhat bigger Capoeira roda for the festival's opening Samba of 1,000 Drums parade, but that was mostly just a break for me on Thursday evening before returning to my cube at CleveMed for a late night, prepping software and devices for the next day's Cavani/FES/CleveMed collaboration.
Friends from the Cleveland FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) Center (Katie, Andy, Juan, and Dimitra) asked if CleveMed and I would like to work with them in a collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Music's Cavani String Quartet. Over a number of months we experimented in acquiring EMG from the musician's muscles while they played (using CleveMed's BioCapture and Kinesia systems), and capturing motion data with FESC's equipment to generate model~animations.
Day-of-show -- at CleveMed in the morning and State Theatre in the afternoon -- was one of the most stressful I've known, but everything really just came together by evening performance-time, and both shows were about as good as I could've hoped. The members of Cavani are amazing musicians and people, and their delivery of Dvořák's "American" was beautiful. The devices and visualizations provided another (sometimes stunning) dimension to the music, as hoped. All of the projections, stage calls, queues, and speaking parts (probably the root of my greatest stress) went smoothly, as a result of focus, attention, and generosity from everyone involved.
Photo by Imagine24 (Some rights reserved.)
More pics: 1,
2,
3
I owe thanks in a lot of directions: FESC friends and colleagues, the Cavani musicians, the stage management and ops people at Playhouse Square, my supervisor, Craig, (both granting me this freedom and for life-saving pair-programming assistance in the final moments,) the rest of my conspirators at CleveMed for making top-notch tech, and Rich Weiss from Ingenuity for gluing us together with logistics and motivation.
I'm already looking forward to next year's festival, and forming vague plans for a project. The intersection of art & tech is one crossroads where I could set up shop, (or at least be happy just hanging out on the curb.)
Peak Suburbia, and Suburbia 2.0
we had better prepare to make other arrangements for living in this country, by which I mean specifically re-localizing, de-globalizing, with an emphasis on local agriculture wherever possible, the emergency restoration of passenger railroad service and related modes of public transit, the rebuilding of local commercial infrastructures, and a radical rethinking of how we inhabit the landscape under New Urbanist lines.
In any case, those who keep wringing their hands over the bulldozers leveling the plots of prairie, or cornfield, or desert -- those distressed folks can direct their anxiety elsewhere. Worry less whether one final strip mall will tilt up out in gloaming, and think harder about how you are going to feed yourself and your family in a couple of years when the stupendous motorized moloch of American life begins to sputter, and the Cheez Doodle shipments can no longer make it to your supermarket shelves, and all that is "normal" melts into air.
-- James Howard Kunstler, Peak Suburbia, (Clusterfuck Nation)
I've been tossing around some ideas for a plant/seed/produce/tool-sharing site to grow a community around local gardeners, (urban, rural, and in-between.)
It seems a nice blend of [my interests in] web, software, ecology, and local community -- helping to build that economy/ecosystem that'll become necessary as our current concoction collapses, (as Kunstler continues to promise.)
I need a good project, but it might be more than I'm up for right now.
participation is passport to effective non-profits
Alex Steffen of WorldChanging suggests that a more personal and empowering kind of participation is becoming the key to maintaining healthy non-profits:
[...] I think that more and more, non-profits are going to be in the business of not so much maintaining memberships, which is what they have done up until now, where basically it's a series of one-to-many communication where you basically send people various form letters and ask them to give you money and to support what you are doing in other ways. I think that is on its way out.
I'm sure they will continue to exist for quite some time, but I think that non-profits that are going to be really effective in the coming decade are going to be the ones that create at least a sense of many-to-many communications, where people feel that they are not just a member, they are a participant [emphasis mine]; where there is lots of communication happening from people in all sorts of positions in the organization, and that there starts to be this blurring of the line, [...]
-- Alex Steffen, Sharing Solutions: An Interview with Alex Steffen of WorldChanging (NetSquared)
I read this and was reminded of Passport Project, a near-and-dear Cleveland non-profit whose maxim is: building community through the arts.
Passport Project is one of the reasons I'm still in Cleveland. I found their Global Community Arts Center (E. 128th and Buckeye) shortly after moving back here ~3 years ago, and began learning Capoeira there. Then some modern dance classes, jazz concerts by excellent (but little-known) musicians, workshops..., and before I knew it I was helping paint the side of the Center, going out with Chloë and Ben, hanging artwork before a party, performing in demos at the Walk & Roll, House of Blues, Parade the Circle...
Chloë and Ben do a great job of blurring those lines of participation. They take sincere interest in those who come share, and infect all with healthy laughter, openness, confidence, and Chloë's mantra of 100% Love. The students become the performers, participants grow into community, and all are invited to the party -- family.
Passport Project has a blog now. A community blog -- everyone can post.
Cleveland Recycling Locations Map
I found the City of Cleveland's list and locator pretty poor, so I rolled my own (Google) map of Cleveland Recycling Drop-off Locations. The map shows all of the public bins where city residents may deposit recyclables.
For the bins I wasn't familiar with, (the majority,) I used the address provided, pointing to a spot right on the road instead of their exact locations, which are at times somewhat hidden. If you can help me pinpoint bins you know about, (the Satellite map view helps) I'd appreciate it.
The map is shared for viewing on Google Maps, but I believe I'm the only one that can edit it there. Please export the data and do what you like with it, though.
Defrag Ohio takeaways
It's too bad more folks didn't attend Defrag Ohio ("Linking Ohio's Rich Media Resources and Renegades") two weeks ago -- some excellent stuff going on there.
I took that Friday off work and bicycled out to Lorain Community College for the second day of the conference. Very pleased to have gone; heard some inform/inspir-ational presentations and panels, got to meet some greats (like social networking guru Valdis Krebs, a few from The Institute For Open Economic Networks, and multi-faceted Susan Miller,) and enjoyed my rides out and back, despite the wind-tunnel I strained against, and the sickly suburban sprawl further out.
Here are a few take-aways and thoughts from the sessions I attended:
Advancing Education, Research and Economic Development in Renewable Energy: Bill Spratley, (Green Energy Ohio (GEO)), Blake Andres (Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC)):
- American Solar Energy Society and GEO are holding the SOLAR 2007 conference in Cleveland July 7th-12th. All-day the 8th is free and open to the public. (See who's going (and show your interest) on Upcoming.)
- The GLSC is installing a solar array to complement the new wind turbine.
- Ohio is host to 30 of the 50 most polluting coal plants in the US.
- thought: The Science Center has the resources and positioning to transform itself into a center for community discourse around renewable energy and emerging green tech, instead of being just a showcase.
Open Source Meets Open Source Economic Development: Bruce Perens (Sourcelabs), Ed Morrison (iOpen), Valdis Krebs (Orgnet.com), George Nemeth (MeetTheBloggers):
- Your organization will monetize and find success it its differentiation. Open-source (or use open source for) the non-differentiating aspects.
Research: 20 Years of Social Network Analysis: Valdis Krebs (Orgnet.com):
- Social connectedness within an organization correlates to commitment to that organization.
- Innovation happens at network intersections.
- Who needs to be introduced to whom? For example: A good bridge in a network can become a bottleneck if too much traffic must pass through them. Directly connect the people between which this bridge is the only connection.
- thought: With many web organizations opening up their data (web 2.0 companies with open APIs, Google Groups, open source project revision control systems, etc.), there's opportunity for (low-cost) large-scale analysis.
- thought: Orgnet's InFlow software could be amazingly useful in re-defining how we understand and view social interaction on all sorts of levels, if made more accessible and extendable. Orgnet's no longer alone in the industry; the field is growing and other solutions are emerging. I'd love to see InFlow open-sourced, or at least made to be web-based and extensible. Orgnet can monetize on differentiators of experience, expertise, and consultation, and allow the tool widespread use and evolution.
Strategic Doing: Open Source, Collaborative Leadership and Social Networks: Ed Morrison (iOpen)
- Everyone's got an idea or two about what needs to be done to strengthen the region. How do we aggregate these ideas and passions? The aggregates are the really important things, and, made material, will gain critical mass.
dorkbot-cleveland
I think Pittsburgh City Paper's recent State of Art article was my introduction exposure to Dorkbots; I must've missed Tech Futures covering Dorkbots coming to Cleveland nearly a year ago.
(Wikipedia:Dorkbot): Dorkbot refers to a group of affiliated organizations worldwide that sponsor meetings of artists, engineers, and designers working in the medium of electronic art.
So, yes, CLE has one, now:
dorkbot-cleveland presents a free, informal gathering of artists, engineers and programmers in the greater-Cleveland area, to show their work. There's a mailing list (but no blog,) and there's been one gathering at the defunct HealthSpace Cleveland (apparently with Rich Weiss of Ingenuity, Case Weatherhead's Fred Collopy, and video artist Kasumi on the bill.)