A lot has been happening with the development of Open Source Economic Development and one of the key tools, the discipline of "Strategic Doing".  Next week, I will be heading out to Seattle where the Department of Labor is conducting its first transformational forum.  About 20 teams of workforce development professionals -- 200 people in all -- will be participating.  The teams represent regional workforce systems, everybody from the One Stop aministrators to the state and federal managers. 

I'll be teaching the practice of Strategic Doing to these teams.  We've been using this approach in Indiana, and the officials at the Department of Labor have seen it work.  As a result, they are adopting this approach in their internal innovation strategy which they are implementing with these transformational forums.

A week later, I will be out in Oklahoma representing the Purdue Center for Regional Development. Purdue will be proposing to the University of Oklahoma a new course in Open Source Economic Development. 

The University of Oklahoma manages the Economic Development Institute, the largest organization for training economic development professionals.  Our preliminary discussions have led us to a proposal in which Purdue and University of Oklahoma will offer a certificate course in Open Source Economic Development beginning in Spring 2008.  We expect that other colleges and universities to offer a similar course, in order to train a new generation of economic development professionals in network-based approaches to economic development. (Indeed, in our area, The University of Akron has expressed an interest.)

Then, the next week, I head for Chicago and another workforce transformational forum. I'm not sure if anyone from Ohio will be participating, but I'll report back. Another 200 professionals have singned up, and there's a waiting list of 25 teams.

In January, I'll be heading out to the National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado.  We will be launching a  national collaboration among regions which are implementing clean energy strategies.  We're starting with about seven regions around the country. The collbboration includes representatives from the Department of Labor, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency. 

We are building out this community of practice and new people are showing up daily. Yesterday, representatives from the Kauffman Foundation, the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance (probably the most advanced region in the country now in clean tech) and Sandia National Labs expressed interest.  The community is focused on the disciplines of strategic doing and open innovation.

In February, I-Open will hold a workshop on Open Source Economic Development. The workshop will take place at Punderson, and it will be based onthe workshop we conducted in September at the Lowe Foundation. The Lowe Foundation has been extremely supportive of our work an has helped us refine a three day workshop teaching the concepts and practices of Open Source Economic Development. Commennts from our participants in the September program were over the top. An example: "I signed up late with little knowledge of what would be actually happening -- so my expectations were not very well formed. However, what I got vs. what I was expecting was incredible." Participants rated the content 4.8 on a 5 scale. 

We are making headway as we develop and deploy new models of economic development. Everything we do is covered by a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license, so people can more easily share and modify these tools and concepts.