Since 2008, I have been actively involved as a Co-Principal Investigator on a 3-year USDA-Specialty Crop Research Initiative, Regional Partnerships for Innovation grant awarded in September 2008 and back-to-back 1-year grants from the Fund For Our Economic Future (FFEF) in 2009-2010 and 2010-2011. These grants complemented one another. The USDA grant sought, in part, to develop a social networking infrastructure —LocalFoodSystems.org — for connectivity and collaboration that would inspire participation in agriculture localization. The FFEF grants focused on providing social networking participants with templates, processes, and tools necessary to catalyze significant entrepreneurial activity through increased localization within a regional agriculture-bioscience industry cluster.
During this 4-year period, I posted to blogsites, created websites, tested platforms and applications, prepared presentations, provided coaching, and contributed to papers and proposals all related to the themes of these two grants. Most of the information generated unfolded chronologically and addressed particular topics of interest in the moment. Furthermore, it was made available through the media that best supported the message being delivered to specific audiences. This led to a general mishmash of material with wide variations in timing, theme, track, and target making it difficult for those who may have an interest to consider what I tried, why I did it the way I did, what happened as a result, and what I learned along the way.
To address this shortfall, put a final wrap on the grants, and move my thinking into new areas of interest, I will begin a series of postings under the heading of Sustainable Local Economic Development that recasts my work in a more searchable framework. As with this introduction, these postings will appear on Blogger with links to the Sustainable Local Economic Development group on LocalFoodSystems.org (LFS) — you may need to join LFS (free) in order to view posts linked to it — Tumblr, Slideshare, and Scoop.it and announcements to Steve Bosserman on Twitter.
To help organize the information in the postings and maintain consistency in the framework, I will apply one or more of the following tags to each entry:
- organization dynamics
- business ecosystems
- food systems
- localization
- local economy
- mapping
- business case
- work space
- market network
- business model
- governance
- self-reliance
- transactions
- community investment portfolio
- project management
I welcome your feedback about any of the postings as well as input on the tagging convention. This is a complex, yet very important subject about which there are few absolutes and far more questions than answers. The more we can learn together from our different experiences with sustainable local economic development through these media, the more valuable the outcomes. Thanks in advance for your interest and consideration.
Originally posted to Sustainable Local Economic Development by Steve Bosserman on Sunday, August 5, 2012
Frameworks for Understanding the World 