News Articles

Of course, those of us on WIRED Nation are. But how about those legions of people out in the rest of the workforce development world? A couple of items have come across my desk in the last two weeks that offer some great examples of how foundations and government agencies are using interactive online tools to get their message out, and for internal management. These are good resources to help our peers understand how these tools can be used.

First up, the Chronicle of Philanthropy did a series of articles about foundations that are posting videos, creating online radio shows and inviting readers to comment and react. They're also offering readers ways to act on what they've learned. You can read the main article here; the article about how one small foundation is making itself heard is here. What I love is that these foundations admit they're taking risks and experimenting to find out what works and what doesn't.

Next up, Governing magazine. Their May 2008 article, Working in Wiki, gives some great examples of how government agencies are using wikis to improve internal management and engage staff in program improvements and problem solving.

When I do workshops on web 2.0 for workforce development professionals, I often get a question along the lines of, "Blogging and podcasting is what my kids do for fun. What's it got to do with my job?"

As these articles show, quite a lot, and more every day.

That is the title of a column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about how government is now trying to take advantage of web 2.0 technologies.  Here are a couple key excerpts...

You don't need to have a Facebook account, or to have edited a Wikipedia entry, to understand that the Web is in another highly disruptive period. Online tools under the rubric Web 2.0 are changing how information flows, with social networks letting people communicate directly with one another. This is reversing the top-down, one-way approach to communications that began with Gutenberg, challenging everything from how bosses try to manage to how consumers make or break products with instant mass feedback.

The institution that has most resisted new ways of doing things is the biggest one of all: government. This is about to change, with public-sector bureaucracies the new target for Web innovators...

Daniel Mintz, chief information officer for the Transportation Department, has noted how radical it is for government agencies to engage in wikis. They challenge the traditional notion that "all published information produced by a government agency be 'accurate,'" and that "any material a federal employee publishes can be taken as establishing or implying the establishment of formal policy."

Mississippi has a drop-out problem...but then again, we all do. While Mississippi's graduation rate from high school is 64.1%, the nation's is about 70%. 

State officials in Mississippi are set on reducing their drop-out rate by 50% in five years. 

As a recent article from Hattiesburg, Mississippi points out:

The economic reality of an undereducated class is staggering.

Dropouts from the Class of 2007 will cost Mississippi almost $3.9 billion in lost wages and taxes over their lifetime, according to the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy organization based in Washington.

Dropouts cost Mississippi $458 million each year, Bounds said. The number comes from money spent on social services, including medical care and prison. It also figures in lost revenue in taxes based on what all those dropouts might have made in income had they completed high school.

More than 13,000 students drop out every year in Mississippi, according to the Mississippi Department of Education.

The dropout rate for black and Hispanic students is close to 50 percent nationwide, according to the America's Promise Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit collaborative chaired by Alma Powell and founded by her husband, Gen.Colin Powell. In Mississippi, about 57 percent of blacks graduate compared to 71 percent of whites.

Dropouts earn about $9,200 less per year than high school graduates.

Read more.

Here are some basic resources to learn more about reducing dropouts: 

1. Alliance for Excellent Education
   
2. America's Promise Alliance
   
3. The Silent Epidemic report from the Gates Foundation
4. National Dropout Prevention Center
   

The Piedmont Triad is  is moving ahead with a lead organization for its advanced manufacturing cluster. Here's how Teresa Reynolds puts it: 

“It is our vision that the management of the advanced manufacturing  industry cluster would be led by a contractor that would help develop and implement short and long term strategies that will leverage the global manufacturing competencies of the Piedmont Triad Region.,” says Theresa Reynolds, PTP Senior Vice President and WIRED Project Manager.   Reynolds adds, “The Automation Federation has an extensive network of relationships in the advanced manufacturing cluster and they are very familiar with the tools necessary to engage manufacturers and to lead discussions that address the issues and barriers affecting advanced manufacturing.

You can read more here. 

Here's an interesting idea: internships for teachers. One of the major challenges we face in realigning our education system comes in upgrading the skills of teachers.

Teachers often have little experience in business, and initiatives like this one in Baltimore can help teachers understand how to connect their lesson plans and teaching strategies to the world of work. 

Here's an overview: 

The program is part of a local workforce development initiative. It aims to connect Frederick County Public Schools with businesses to work together in building the county’s future workforce.

The externship program is still in planning stages, but organizers hope to start a pilot program this summer with three positions for teachers at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick. The four-week externships will pay $7,500 and will be geared toward Advanced Placement biology teachers. Ideally, the externships should start right after July 4, Markoe said.

The program will continue to build from there, as soon as it receives an expected $100,000 Workforce Development grant, allowing for another 13 externships with large companies and agencies – from Bechtel and State Farm Insurance to Fort Detrick...

The externship program is just one of many initiatives coming out of the Frederick County Business Roundtable for Education – a new partnership between Frederick County Public Schools, Frederick Community College, The Frederick County Chamber of Commerce, Frederick County Economic Development and Fort Detrick. The partnership aims to bridge the gap between the business and education communities, allow businesses to reach students and essentially create a climate for building a 21st century workforce.

You can read more here. 

There is a fascinating article in this week's New Yorker about the process of innovation.  Malcolm Gladwell discusses the many occurrences of simultaneous innovation and looks at a group from the Pacific Northwest focused on spawning ideas and inventions. 

One of the main advantages of WIRED involves the flexibility of using federal funds to leverage additional investments with new ideas. In North Central Indiana, we used WIRED funds to identify and strengthen entrepreneurship skills through business plan competitions. 

Business plan competitions are one of the best ways to raise the profile of entrepreneurship within a region. We could not used WIRED funds for prize money, so we turned to our state economic development folks for help. They lined up the support we needed to develop a successful competition. 

You can read more about our competition here. 

If you are interested in the background information on our approach, please contact Pat Bacon at the Indiana Venture Center. 

Here are some examples of other business plan competitions around the country: 

• Mississippi State University
  
• UC Berkeley
  
• Rice University
  
• Northwest Venture Championship
  

Here's a recording of the presentation by Steven Goldsmith, former mayor of Indianapolis. Goldsmith talked to us about how government is creating public value by coordinating networks. This perspective provides a useful way of looking at how WIRED works. 

Above all, WIRED is a way of thinking; a set of strategies to accelerate regional prosperity through talent development. 

The recording is about 30 minutes long. If you have the time, it's worth a listen. 

Mary Ellen Clark, WIRED Bio-1 and Aaron Fichter, Ph.D, Heldrich Center for Workforce Development take a look at how to measure the effectiveness of your implementation strategies.

Some of the key questions addressed include:

1. Are you feeling any pain over the time/resources it takes to collect data and report on it?
2. Are you confident the data you report is accurate

Bio-1 is in Central New Jersey, and comprises 5 counties and 4 workforce investment boards. Some initiatives they have focused on include: life science career campaign, career academies, residential programs, increasing bioscience workforce development with the 'Flak Jackets to Lab Coats' program to reintegrate returning vets into the workforce, enhancing linkages between education and industry via the web.

Metrics Steps:

Plan and Prepare (critical few, leverage/impact), Develop a Framework (strategy/alignment, balance, data collection), Development (Strategy ALignment,Balance, Op. Definitions), Deployment (Vertical alignment, accountability transfer), Collect and Analyze Data (Review Process, Actions, Project ID), Review Process (status, opportunities, projects), Plan and Prepare (Strategic Objectives, Development Team).

Operational Definitions:

Measure Owner: Who will report on this metric

Data Owner:  Who will collect and summarize data

Formula: How is this derived?

Benchmark/Goal: What is the target? If you have benchmarks from comparable regions include them here.

 Read more >>   Options >>  

At the Boston Academy, Ed Morrison gave a helpful overview of WIRED Nation, what you as a WIRED Nation user should try to get out of it, and what you can do to contribute and interact in the community itself:

If you don't have an effective way to structure information, you end up with a 'garbage bag' of stuff - this is why on WIRED Nation we are making effective use of categories and tagging. It helps the community identify common themes as it to relates to a piece of content, such as 'advanced manufacturing', 'biosciences', etc. Moreover, categories and tags allow you to search using the 'Advanced Search' to

A few key components of WIRED Nation include:

• Forums: essentially a running list of comments - a discussion unfolding as a series of comments on comments
  

• Weblogs aka 'Blogs': generally represent a way for an individual to share information with a group
• Wikis: a fantastic way for more than one person to create content ; a quick and easy way for business professionals to be able to author content to the web quickly and effective - in a matter of minutes.
• RSS: allows you to grab content from the web and be automatically updated anytime any content is changed on that webpage.

In WIRED Nation, we have the following tabs:

• 'Forums' is an area for you to have ongoing discussions around particular topics
• 'Regions' is a wiki page which has been created to share the industry segments, key contacts, implementation plan, etc. in each region.
  
• 'Home' is yet another great example of a wiki page in action - this is a easily editable webpage including graphics, a slideshow, etc., which is updated by members of WIRED Nation, not an IT professional.
  
• 'Stories' is where we are sharing complex stories of what is working in various WIRED regions.
• 'Library' is where we are putting files - files can include a detailed description of what a particular file is
• 'Events' is a great place for us to share schedules for key sessions and events with other regions.
  

WIRED Nation is an open community which allows us to have the most qualified and well represented discussion - there is no 'webmaster', but rather the community as a whole driving the discussion.

A few points Ed emphasized include:

Categorization and tagging.

According to Ed, "categories are like the chapters of a book." For example, in WIRED Nation they include broad ideas and concept areas such as 'Innovation', 'Entrepreneurship', 'Talent', etc. Tags, however "are like the index in the back of the book." Use categories and tags together to make if far easier to find content later as well as to help people more quickly deduce what the relevance of a particular post is.

Weekly Webinars

Fridays at 1PM EST, we have a webinar in which we discuss what is new in WIRED Nation, and go over regional initiatives and how to increase visibility and support for these initiatives in the community using WIRED Nation.

Blogging:

The blog is a great way to quickly share points of interest with the rest of WIRED Nation - maybe a paragraph our two or a link to an interesting research finding or editorial related to economic development.

Jump in - contributing takes only a few minutes. The Law of Networks states that value accrued from a network increases exponentially as each new connection is added.

The FT has two reports on new developments in the Brazilian ethanol market.  First:

Cosan, Brazil’s biggest sugar and ethanol producer, has agreed to buy the Esso chain of filling stations in Brazil from ExxonMobil for $826m plus $198m in debt. The deal represents the first big investment by a sugar and ethanol producer in retail fuel distribution.

Cosan’s acquisition of Esso comes as sales of fuel ethanol have overtaken sales of gasoline in the country for the first time, including the use of ethanol as an additive in gasoline of up to 25 per cent by volume.

Full article here (subscription required).

And second:

BP (British Petroleum) announced plans to invest $560m in biofuels on Thursday and argued that its proposals to develop ethanol production from sugar cane in Brazil would not affect food supplies. The oil group plans to spend $60m buying a 50 per cent stake in a Brazilian joint venture and invest a further $500m in two ethanol refineries.

Full article here (subscription required).

These show the continued acceleration of investments in the alternative fuels industry and regions pursuing energy strategies should note the major players and size of the deals.