EtSy is working with Rockford Il to try to scale up EtSy-based Entrepreneur Ship as Economic Development. One of the benefits of having a strong manufacturing history, however, is that many residents already have skills in the arts (such as watchmaking and furniture making) that were once the backbone of the local economy... Our visit led to a plan for Etsy and Rockford to co-create a Craft Entrepreneurship Curriculum, with Etsy’s platform and marketplace as the learning lab. The aim of the project is to teach people that if they have a craft skill, entrepreneurship and economic opportunity are within reach.

The Honduran (Honduras) government wants to create what amounts to internal start-ups—quasi-independent City State-s that begin with a clean slate and are then overseen by outside experts. They will have their own government, write their own laws, manage their own currency and, eventually, hold their own elections... The Honduran regions are modelled on a concept called “Charter City-s” developed by Paul Romer, an economics professor at New York University.

In addition to a big special development region, the Honduran government intends to approve two smaller zones. And two libertarian-leaning start-ups have already signed a preliminary memorandum of understanding with the Honduran government to develop them. One firm goes by the name of Future Cities Development Corporation. It was co-founded by Patri Friedman, a grandson of Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and until recently executive director of the Sea Steading Institute, a group producing research on how to build ocean-based communes. The other is called Grupo Ciudades Libres (Free Cities Group) and is the brainchild of Michael Strong and Kevin Lyons, two Entrepren Eur-s and Libertar Ian activists.

Sept06'2012 update: the government signed a "memorandum of understanding" with a group of international investors on Tuesday. That group is MGK, which includes Michael Strong - here is their FAQ. Paul Romer got left aside in this process: He believed that a temporary transparency commission he had formed with a group of well-known experts should have been consulted. He withdrew from the project.

May'2013 update. In January a second round of constitutional amendments to legalize free zones passed through Congress the requisite two times. Still ahead: the more complicated task of the new statute laying out the leeway those zones will have and the rules by which they will interface with Honduras proper.

Never got to the cloud->laptop synching of Simple Note from z2012-10-06-SimpleNoteSynchWithPython. Just stuck to writing only on the laptop, and pushing changes to cloud which I'd then synch to Flick Note on my AnDroid tablet for reading-only.

Started noticing that some notes would have individual lines or whole chunks repeated within the same note.

Today did some research and found this which shows I'm not the only one.

Also note that Shawn Blanc ran into some issues with NvAlt synching, too.

JayRosen's Studio20 NYU class has been working with The Atlantic's Quartz site on a model Crowd Sourcing Journal Ism ("the networked beat"). When the users know more than the journalists, what are good journalists supposed to do?.. We think there are brand opportunities for Quartz in making its own: Intelligent filters, Preferred sources, River Of News. (Another Dave Winer concept.)

Studio20 and Pando Daily have partnered to work on a new tool that will be revealed in the future.

I hadn't realized that New Orleans had jumped into the Charter School movement after Hurricane Katrina. On the last state achievement test before Katrina hit, 74 percent of eighth-graders had failed to demonstrate "basic" skills in English/Language Arts, and 70 percent scored below "basic" in math. The Orleans Parish School Board, which ran the city's schools, was $450 million in debt. Yet these numbers did not begin to capture the day-to-day texture of the schools: when students held a press conference to express their post-Katrina wishes, they asked for textbooks, toilet paper, and teachers who liked them... Three months after Katrina, the state legislature deemed 107 of the 128 city-run public schools "failing" and seized control of them for five years. (Before the storm the state had already placed five failing schools in what it called the Recovery School District, then converted them to charter schools.) Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the Teachers Union.

May'2013: The Louisiana Supreme Court has ruled that the current method of funding the statewide School Vouchers program is unconstitutional... Justice John Weimer writes, "The state funds approved through the unique MFP process cannot be diverted to nonpublic schools or other nonpublic course providers according to the clear, specific and unambiguous language of the constitution."... The New Orleans voucher program was paid for through the state general fund.