Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
Greek that I may learn to speak
I spent a large part of yesterday in a tutorial with Betsey Merkel of I-OPEN. She was kindly trying to help me understand how Near-Time works.
For those of us who need to enhance the reach of our businesses by building online communities and markets for them, as well as increasing collaborations and partnerships, Near-Time may be worth looking into.
What it does - if I got the essence of what Betsey was saying - is make it much easier for entrepreneurs to create online spaces for their companies that serve not just as informational pages, but also as virtual meeting rooms, where people including customers and teams can gather, share ideas, work together and do business.
It sounded to me like a set of power tools that allows you to rapidly construct a combination of standard website plus media outlet, conference center and what Betsey called storefront. If that’s correct, it could be a godsend to someone like me who has to spend days, sometimes weeks or months, trying to figure out how to get certain site features and functions created, then more days or weeks waiting for someone else to construct them.
I certainly don’t understand it all yet. But one thing I’m clear on: Anything that helps me reach more people faster and enrich my site with services more easily is something I need to check out. And I’m hoping that, in the course of studying services such as Near-Time, the techno-jargon of the web will start sounding less like Greek to me and more like the lingua franca I desperately need in order to communicate well with the designers, developers and other websters I depend on.
So far for me, working with web technology has been like trying to read the train schedule in a foreign country. I know where I want to go, but I end up sidetracked or in the wrong city altogether because most of the words mean nothing to me. Software ought to come with phrase books. (Donde es el Es Es El ? )
But since it doesn’t, I’ll keep trying to teach myself to understand things like Near-Time – with the help of patient people like Betsey.
Virtual networks for actual economic development
I made a recording today.
No, I wasn’t singing, although I’ve made those kinds of recordings, too, and boy, can that process be tedious.
This was a lot easier because all I had to do was talk about what’s important to me professionally: my business; helping the world value and practice creativity; and building a happier future by inventing better solutions to our problems.
A woman named Betsey Merkel was behind the camera. A member of the Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-OPEN, www.i-open.org), she’s been instrumental in helping Northeast Ohioans form themed virtual networks to promote idea-sharing and more productive, collaborative efforts among people trying to solve community problems and/or build business.
Merkel was recording my words for the Women’s Enterprise Network (www.womensenterprisenetwork.net), a group made up of women interested in empowering themselves, helping each other and contributing to economic development and civic leadership. WEN isn’t just a virtual network: Its members regularly meet for dinners, coffees and face-to-face discussion. But with Merkel’s help, the network has also begun building a virtual video library of community knowledge gleaned from those of us who are out there working, being entrepreneurial and trying to improve the world around us.
Betsey wanted me to answer three questions for the video: What do I feel passionate about right now; what do I want other people to know, think, feel and do; and what do I envision for the future?
I’m not sure how much I added to Northeast Ohio’s store of knowledge, but I came away encouraged that someone wanted to know what I think and what I’m trying to do. More important, I was heartened to discover that so many talented people in my region are working valiantly to change our collective luck by thinking innovatively and supporting each other. That’s the kind of network we all need. And it just gets better as more of us join it.