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Development

Redevelopment too

Personal development is your springboard to personal excellence. Ongoing, continuous, non-stop personal development literally assures you that there is no limit to what you can accomplish.
Brian Tracy

For Pittsburgh to thrive, it needs development on a human scale. We've got to better ourselves. Growth, investment, nurturing can happen within the people before it becomes evident in bricks, mortar and buildings.

We mechanize community information resources with 9x9

9x9 is Under the Hood Richness

The PERCs are going to park at different spaces throughout the district. But, how do they run? Just as guys gather as you lift the hood of a car -- people are going to want to inspect the engine and make assumptions about its logic and power based upon its volume and chrome.

Consistency

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and devines.
Emerson

Ambitions

If a hub and network is going to make a significant contribution to the fabric of Pittsburgh's landscape, it needs to have depth and breath. Shooting for the stars happens in the 9x9 mapping.

With nine departments, each is going to have an opportunity to manage nine different courses / classes / roundtables. Each department is expected to have its own team of teachers, advocates, administrators and partners.

Some classes are expected to meet once per month. Some might meet in person as few as once per season.

Should the program evolve to three classes per night and utilize three nights per week, we'd have nine classes per week. Given each department one class per week, a semester could easily fit into a nine-week period.

As growth occurs and if a tenth department is needed, or if a tenth class is needed within any single department, then the time for a spin-off might be near.

Fit

A catalog with 9 departments each hosting 9 courses generates 81 network nodes for engagement of citizens. A fully populated agenda sounds massive, but the challenge can easily slide into the evenings with a few classrooms at one venue given a typical semester. Some classes are only offered once per month and others might meet in a physical space as infrequently as once per semester. A complete 9x9 agenda fit into the evening confines of a typical elementary school.

Organized Knowledge

Humans often locate external resources by browsing a hierarchy. Lookups by name, keyword searchs, and other promotional elements are necessary as well. But most of our early snoopers should come to discover and understand the 9x9 framework.

By-subject hierarchies fulfill an important need. If the seeker does not know the appropriate keywords, nor the name, by-subject hierarchy is a very good method. You start at a top level and then narrow your focus from a short list of selections at each node.

The exposed 9x9 catalog allows someone to jump into a body of knowledge and get oriented quickly (at least in terms of knowing what others think are the important related subjects, areas of research, etc.)

See Also

Some resources and classes will not classify into a single node on the 9x9 subject tree. The use of "See Also" links to other subjects instead of rigid parent-child branches is important.

The 9x9 subject index is not a shelf order. Leaders can easily enter resources in multiple subjects within the web.

Humans love to categorize and 9x9 is another, flexible view

People love to organize things. We break up time into hours, days and years. Everything has to have a name, a history, an understanding of it's origins and must be indexed somewhere on Google.