This blog started not long after I read Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class and blogged about how we chose to live in the Boston area. I followed that up with a post about how we further narrowed our search and moved from Needham to Westwood in 2006.

We like Westwood and I feel like I'm really becoming part of the community. But especially during my recent layoff, we realized how much money it takes to just be here. Lately, we've felt like we didn't go far enough when we sold the expensive Needham house and found this great house in Westwood. What do we need vs. what do we want?

We don't need a home office. My laptop is all I need; it's finding the time to write that is the real challenge. We don't need a big yard; I could care less about a lawn--my view is, "I cut the grass last week; problem solved. But then it came back." We do need a place to ride bikes or walk to a park. We need 3 bedrooms...I can't see "tripling up" the kids, but I do think bunk beds will be fun. So we started to seriously consider "downsizing" to reduce our mortgage further and focus on things that matter to us.

We're not alone in wanting to downsize. Increasingly, people are discovering the virtues of living closer together and realizing space wasn't what they wanted or needed after all.

One thing we REALLY want and need to avoid is the situation when we last moved and spend about 5 months with two mortgages. So we'll sell first and then the fun will begin. We will be looking for a 3 bedroom, one bath, probably around 1200 square foot ranch or cape in Islington or the maze (neighborhood near Westwood High School) at the low end of the housing market here in Westwood. If we need to do work on the house, that's fine as long as we can live in it while we renovate, but it's all part of our calculation.

This weekend is our open house. Come check it out if you are in the market for a great house in a great town.

In my new job at mass.gov today, I posted some information I received about how cities and towns can use Federal stimulus grants to build fire stations. The window of opportunity to apply for the grants is small--just a month starting Monday, June 8. But this is one of many opportunities to improve our communities.

A town in Arizona is already applying for this grant and I suspect the $210 million will go quickly to those who apply with a good plan and urgent need.

I've been wondering how I would manage to keep DaveWrites going (along with IT Heroix and WestwoodBlog, while starting my new job as content manager for Mass.Gov/Recovery) but I think I have the answer. My role gives me a unique "proximity to information" that informs my perspective mightily. I would never use this blog to talk about confidential/internal workings of my job...but sitting at the nexus of government information means I can't help but hear about the issues and programs that are public before they are ignored or distorted by mainstream media.

When I worked on Capitol Hill from 1994-95 in the US Senate...it was the same idea. It wasn't so much that we knew "the inner workings (or non-workings) of government as that we lived in the CNN newsfeed, so we noticed more. It's a welcome return to the policy and political realm for me.

Social media is a vital component of an engagement strategy between government and the people--a connection between Government 2.0 efforts to provide access and transparency and what I have described here as Citizen 2.0. Citizen 2.0 is when non-government people "pick up the ball" and run with it. It's what our Westwood Environmental Action Committee is doing as they pursue a host of efforts to bring energy conservation and sustainability practices to our town. They are the people motivated to figure out how to help the town apply for grants such as the ones listed on our cities and towns information page at Mass.Gov/Recovery.

Whenever I can, I will use DaveWrites to share the public information I'm learning and developing at Mass.Gov, while I continue to write articles on my perspective of how this media is evolving.

I still get nervous when it's my turn to speak at a meeting. When I organize and lead meetings, I still feel like the novice upstart. I still assume there are older people who know better, and I wonder if they will take me seriously.

Then I realize I am 43 years old, and I recall what I thought of 43-year olds when I was 12. I thought they had it all figured out. They were my parents, my parents' friends, the leaders in the community, etc. Sometimes I thought they had it figured out WRONG, but it never occurred to me that those "old" people felt the same feelings--when they were chairing a town committee or standing up to speak in front of a couple hundred people--that I still feel. It is a surreal experience to consider what I would have thought of myself.

We are all still kids in many ways. We don't have it figured out. When we start something new, we are just as nervous as the first time we had to stand up in front of the class. When I talk to people about topics that I have a lot of knowledge about...the reality is, I am still hoping people don't figure out I'm a phony or something. I don't think it ever goes away.

But the excitement of learning doesn't go away either. We are forever young in that when confronted by new experiences, we are like kids again, learning by experience, making mistakes, and figuring out enough to get through today's challenge. As long as the challenges never end, we keep repeating the cycle, and while there is some discomfort in those feelings, there is also the thrill of learning something new and discovering that we can.

I'm too young to write advice on how not to get old, but I believe finding those moments of uncertainty in our lives--and embracing them, not fearing them--is how we stay young.

The blog posts here have been pretty sparse...I see now it has been 3 weeks. I've been busy.

• I start my new job on Tuesday, after Memorial Day, working with Mass.gov to help pull together content related to the Federal stimulus program at http://mass.gov/recovery I feel like I should hold off talking in great detail about that until I actually start working, but it is an amazing opportunity to put many of the ideas I've blogged about here into practice.
• I've been using my flexible schedule to do lots of footwork in setting up our local Community Access Television station. Of course I started a blog about that too at http://westwoodtv.org. We are close to agreement on a equipment and setting up our station; I hope we'll be able to launch something in the next few months.
• The Pedestrian and Bike Safety Committee I spearheaded here in Westwood was officially formed and had its first meeting last night.
• I continue working to execute a social media strategy for my client, Heroix, principally through their blog and Twitter presence. The blog is a real repository of many of the tips and scrappy ideas I've learned and used over the past decade in my tech companies.

My new job is a career change and it is a direct result of my social media efforts. I did not set out to find a new "job" per se on January 1, but instead started a consulting business, looked for work in technology, and continued to pursue the writing and participation I started over 2 years ago on this blog. I was fortunate to find a role that I believe fits my passions and interests much more than any technical position. I will still be using technology--but I'm all about communication now--helping others communicate and hopefully even helping our economy by connecting resources and people to serve the mission of our state government.

So stay tuned. I will, of course, blog responsibly here--don't expect any secret inside information on Massachusetts politics. My mission is really to obviate the need for that and demonstrate that transparency in government can be achieved and, more importantly, that it can be made to work for the good of all.

After waiting on hold for 40 minutes, I obtained some answers to questions that I hope will clarify how unemployed people who have some temporary income can maintain uninterrupted health coverage under Massachusetts Medical Security Program (MSP).

This is an update of my prior post on how the Medical Security Program coordinates with the Federal Economic Stimulus and Recovery Act.

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I recently reviewed the mission statement of this blog and was struck by how it sums up my own "mission."

The purpose of this blog is to connect topics in economic development, community development, and new media technology and identify practical actions readers can take to make a difference in improving our society.

I want this to be more than a writing project. I wrote a series of posts about a business plan, a sort of thematic arrangement of content topics I would write about to create a popular blog. That's not really a business plan--the business plan was just to get more traffic and use google adwords to make some money off clicks. But for that to work, I need hundreds of thousands of visitors...I need the blog to be an end unto itself...and that is not what this is about.

The blog is a tool, a communication medium that has connected me with people who share ideals and passions about improving society. I think there are many of us who are engaged in what Ed Morrison of the I-Open Institute describes as "Strategic Doing." Some of the things I'm "doing" strategically are to:

• create a blog in Westwood to encourage greater participation of residents in our community
• form a Pedestrian/Bicycle Safetey Committee in Westwood to look for opportunities to make the town more walkable
• get a Community Access Television station up and running in Westwood

Now what does any of this have to do with economic development?

The older, traditional ideas about economic development were about attracting business to locate in town. It was about creating a regulatory climate friendly for business and identifying opportunities--then clearing obstacles. I'm not a practitioner and I cannot claim expertise about the work that continues in that conception of economic development. But I think there is a "New Innovation" growing based on an increasingly engaged and creative Citizen 2.0.

If we can find ways to connect the people who are innovating--problem-solving individuals who care passionately about issues of sustainability and growth--I believe people will be begin to see opportunities to invest. This will become "Enterprise Collaboration."

Again, what does it mean?

To revitalize a town, you need people, not just business. You need the people who will shop there and the people who will open stores. You need people who live there and care about the community and who choose to make their stake in town, rather than hopping in a car and driving to a job in the city where they can collect a paycheck and go home to sleep and watch TV. You don't need EVERYONE to do this, but you need a critical mass of a few people who are no longer fighting the good fight alone, but who network with each other, draw strength from each other, and see opportunities they would not have seen alone.

It is the same principle in schools--to make them better, we don't need more money alone, we need parents to be involved. We need that elusive and powerful force of responsibility and activism that is more evident in its absense in the anonymous suburbs and isolated communities of regions in decline.

What next? What do I do?

That's the $100,000 question, really. I need to find a way to take these ideas and passions and not only accomplish things, but generate income for me and my family. My website describes one approach of the type of consultative advice I believe I could deliver. But talk is cheap...or, more realistically, just sitting around talking about theory is not something cash strapped town can afford to bankroll.

I could create a non-profit, an association not unlike a chamber of commerce, but more of a business facilitator...then choose projects to tackle and start delivering value to the members of the organization. Perhaps opportunities come out of more of these discussions...perhaps it is as basic as helping civic organizations set up blogs and facebook pages. But I think fundamentally, I need to identify some real, specific needs of the community and find how money is currently being spent towards that need--then propose a less expensive alternative.

I caught a glimpse of the network news tonight, where an Earth Day inspired discussion was highlighting both "sides" of the question of whether America could Afford to Go Green. On one side, business leaders and environmetalists are getting down to business to make something happen at the Fortune Brainstorm: Green event. On the other side, a dour spoilsport from the American Enterprise Institute cautioned that a recession was a bad time to spend money on something like this.

Watch this Frontline episode below (OK, it is 2 hours, but make it fullscreen and sit back for a comprehensive perspective on how growth and development built up an environmental debt our children will have to pay.)

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My posts on unemployment in Massachusetts have drawn commentary here and attention from the media and government. A producer from WBUR called me last week to set up a panel discussion on Friday where I will join an economist and the Commonwealth's Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development, Suzanne Bump to talk about the situation in Massachusetts and respond to listeners who call in with questions. I've also been talking with a staffer at that agency, where they have started a blog about jobs and unemployment.

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I'm tired of hearing people complain that so many don't read newspapers or vote or participate in their communities. The belief that Americans have become apathetic, complacent conformists is accepted as conventional wisdom, when, in fact, I believe it is about to reverse and correct in a dramatic fashion. I would go so far as to say the death of newspapers and disengagement of traditional forms of participation is more a recognition that those forms are irrelevant to people today and that the impulse to participate drives people to more effective channels. We're mourning the death of the irrelevant while new forms are flourishing.

But first, let's look at the real symptoms of change.

Robert Putnam considered the decline of community in his book Bowling Alone and concluded that generational change and television were largely responsible for a decline in civic engagement, colorfully metaphorized by the decline of bowling leagues. The key "surprise" in his book was the illustration that decline in civic participation was only slighty due to the usual supects of work/sprawl/lifestyle--my own assessment that the reason I was not more involved in my community was that the schedule of commuting and working in Boston left me no time to be "present" in my community...but I was wrong. The biggest factor in the decline of "involvement" was simply the passing of generations...the fact that a large group of people--boomers--replaced the "greatest generation" as they moved through life stages, and these boomers had different lifestyles.

My law professor, David Skover, taught a media seminar while writing a book, the Death of Discourse, where he expanded on the media theories of Marshal McLuhan, and more recently Neil Postman, to illustrate that our consumption of passive media, like television, was fundamentally changing the way we think. Al Gore picked up on this thread in his book The Assault on Reason where he bemoaned the decline of civility in conversation and the increasing impossibility of rational argument in a culturally-politicized world.

Doom and gloom. We're all going stupid and irrational. How many more seasons of Survivor could there be?

But other things are happening that change the world.

• Our work lives have broken down traditional models of compartmentalization...we live and work in a "bursty, always on" style that is frustrating to navigate, but "better" in many ways once we figure out how to manage the transitions. Richard Florida developed a whole economic development worldview around the idea that the changing nature of work--the fact that more and more of us are engaged in "creative class" type work activities is changing the way we live.
• A massive cohort of collaborative, optimistic young people is entering the workforce. Generation Y, the NetGen, whatever you want to call them, represent a massive generational change that, consistent with Putnam's theories, has to exert a big impact on our society.
• The medium is changing. Television was the medium that was diagnosed as having changed us so profoundly. Not even 10 years ago, we sat and stared and watched the drivel that was beamed to us from mass media producers and we consumed a steady diet of mind-numbing idiocy that anesthetized us to our dissatisfaction. But it began to fade...and the volume was turned up until we are now served an unbelievable diet of violent obscenity that is necessary to waken our dulled senses. But increasingly, we are tuning out. In a time of transition, it is hard to see the edge of change, but instead of wondering how far they can go, we should be wondering why they have had to go so far to hold our attention. The answer is that it is failing because we need something better.

The new medium is collaborative and participatory. The new medium is expressed in terms of "social media" and a society of publishers...where people turn off their televisions to go write a blog. In a time of transition, some things seem ridiculous...how can updating my Facebook status be more socially-responsible than sitting down to read the New York Times? But it WILL be this and more...and it will change us all...but that is a post for another day...