Civic Networking

A friendly correspondent emailed me yesterday for clarification of the following comment:

If IP and the Great Lakes Urban Exchange and the Rust Belt Bloggers Network come across as a bunch of outsiders trying to fell trees in their own forest, then the movement is a non-starter, amusing to its own members and to no one else.

This was my brief, preliminary response:

The short version of the point is that the community organizers and urban visionarties need to engage the enterprise builders -- the venture capitalists, the lawyers, the investment bankers, and the technology developers. In my opinion, community organizing as such can never overcome the inertia that grips development efforts in Pittsburgh and elsewhere.

Am I right, or am I off base? Clearly, community organizers in some places are trying to forge an independent path. If they're succeeding at the community level, is that success spilling over into the economic development domain? So that we don't all look only at Great Lakes/Rust Belt communities for benchmarks, take a look at the impressive Imagine Miami, an interesting civic networking resource.