Marc's Voice

How to build a Digital City - draft 2

So I’ve just put up a draft 2 of the textbook I’ll be using when teaching a class (starting in the fall) in the Northern Ohio region. 

It’s called “How to build a Digital City” and it’s available on Blurb - right now.  Now I just gotta figure out how to get a pdf out of the Blurb editor, so I can give it all to you for free for download.

I’m still finalizing the deals, but it looks like I’ll be teaching the class at CWRU, Lorain County Community College, Univ of Akron and Oberlin (and hopefully CSU.)

I’d also like to announce that I’m incubating a new company - called Digital City Mechanics - at the Youngstown Business Incubator.  I’ll be moving my family to Cleveland in the summer.  Shoutout to my homeboys George, Paul, Kent, Ed, Lev and Jim!  And Frank, Curtis, Jon, Patty, Mark, Cara, Susie, Susan, John and Hunter.

This Digital City project has me putting all my theory into practice.  For the past few years I’ve had to go hat-in-hand to customers trying to convince them what to do with my platform.  Now I’m going to go and do what I want to do with my platform.

And that’s build an Open Digital City.  Where workforce development, content production and local foods meet in the valley of health care, medical digitizing and the history polymers.  Add to that some Seniors interviews, green jobs knowledge bases and authorized venues, community services and common constructs - and you have our project!  Oh yah - and a business directory of……

This second book is a compendium to my first book - “How to build the Open Mesh”.  That book is the insidery, theoretical book on the underlying tenets, structure and strategy of our distributed future.  And this second book - will put all that theory into practice.

Stay tuned - it should be fun.  Something I can take to the White House and Katie Stanton.  A distributed architecture based on dashboards and open standards.

I’ve lived in California for 21 years.  We brought the first software company to the SOMA area in 1987.  Now I’m taking a whole new attitude to Northern Ohio.  So:

- 2 books, a class and a new project