Case: participating in the region's renaissance
I'm delighted to read Sudhir's post on REALNEO about the unfolding events of the Voices and Choices initiative of the Fund for Our Economic Future. I'm saving the date of November 12 so that I can attend the Town Meeting for the region, which will be held in Akron, but that event is only the culmination of lots of work which is going on right now. Community leaders are being trained to conduct interviews with citizens, to build an online database of positive images for our region's future which come from a broad swath of its residents.
I hope that Case students are among those who will conduct interviews and funnel what they learn back to the Voices and Choices website. (It's wonderful that Sudhir is involved, especially since he is a Weatherhead MBA alumnus, but one person can only do so much alone.) I hope that students will interview each other, and share their ideas about what Northeast Ohio can do to keep more of our young college graduates in the region. Just as the Facebook group says, "Case Can Be Enjoyable If You Stop Bitching About It And Find Stuff To Do!" and the same goes for Cleveland and the surrounding region. (If you don't want to sign up for a free Facebook account, I'll just note that there are 310 members of this group at Case, and 17 groupies, which is not bad considering that there are less than 3000 undergraduates at Case and some of them avoid Facebook on principle.)
I also hope that Case students will take the initiative to leave campus and do some interviews with citizens in surrounding neighborhoods, because I think that would do a lot to counteract outdated perceptions of the university. We used to turn our back on the surrounding city, but as yesterday's third annual Case for Community Day and the ongoing efforts of the Office of Student Community Service and the Center for Community Partnerships demonstrate, we have made considerable progress over the last several years in changing how we relate to the neighborhoods and the city around us.
For students who don't want to leave their dorm rooms to volunteer, perhaps you'd like to collaborate with OneCleveland and Case's ITS department on putting together a proposal to host the next Wikimedia Foundation international conference in Cleveland? I think it could be relatively easy to do better than the draft proposal that is coming together for Toronto as a host city, and Lev Gonick put me in touch with Mark Ansboury at One Cleveland and John Russell here at Case. If you have suggestions about how to galvanize Northeast Ohio Wikipedia editors and readers to bring Wikimania to Cleveland, please let me know... it would be a great way to continue to build a positive image of Cleveland among techies and internet geeks around the globe.
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