- Cvsg - list.chattanooga.digital

Focus the Study Group on how to do better and make more?
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 26, 2026

April 26, 2026

There’s been a bit of feedback on the group’s “North Star” — engage people to connect various efforts to address community issues. Might it make sense to focus it on work: how to create jobs and increase incomes via entrepreneurship and small business. How do we develop our local talent and enable our talented people to capitalize on their creativity, knowledge, and skills? “Work” was a general topic of Venture that did not get as much attention as the other topics. It is a really critical general issue for our community, especially with the County Mayor wanting to close the BDC. I think we would get some very powerful and useful insights from the community if we asked and listened. What to you think? Bad idea? Good idea? Thoughts about how and where to do this and who to engage? Also, please spread the word about the dialogue session on Monday. — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Housing dialogue session on Monday
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 21, 2026

April 21, 2026

Our next dialogue session is this coming Monday, April 27th, 5:30 PM (doors open at 5:00). It will focus on housing and be anchored by Chris Thompson, president and CEO of CNE. You can get additional information and register online at https://luma.com/oo948apo. Please share! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Chattanooga Venturing Study Group's "North Star"
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 15, 2026

April 15, 2026

During our discussion at the last CVSG regular meeting about refocusing on active, applied learning, Tricia asked about the Study Group’s “North Star.” The other day Becca Dunston, a new participant in the group, emailed me with the suggestion of using “how do we?” questions to guide our effort. She had several good specific questions for dialogue topics. In general, she suggested asking “how do we build genuine community engagement that connects the fragmented efforts already underway rather than adding another siloed initiative?” I think this is a great “North Star” for the group, an ideal way to focus our learning. It makes lessons from Venture very relevant but also focuses us on where we want to go. The key implication is that our objective requires identifying as many “efforts already underway” as possible and relating them to each other, ideally via direct, interpersonal connections and collaboration. For “genuine community engagement,” I think we can use the fundamental rationales for community engagement as criteria: How do we tap into the capabilities and intelligence that distributed throughout the community? How do we get community members to buy into and support efforts? How do we facilitate collaboration to maximize community benefits and reduce duplication of efforts and risk of conflict? What do you think? — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Follow-up to today's regular meeting and next steps
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 7, 2026

April 7, 2026

Thanks, all, for your continued interest in learning from Chattanooga Venture about engaging and mobilizing community members for inclusive, positive, sustainable change. The discussion today confirmed my thinking about evolving the group into a network, which means (1) we all contribute and coordinate while (2) we all do our own things and (3) we connect others who are working for inclusive, positive, sustainable change. Going forward I’m going to personally focus on listening to the voice of the community as a representative of Chattanooga.Digital—our new community tech cooperative… and the world’s first digital utility! Chattanooga.Digital will provide the software infrastructure for this, the means for people to connect, engage, and share, as a community service. It’s literally our mission. The Study Group will transition from in-person meetings to the online platform, venturing.chattanooga.digital. Our next regular Study Group meeting on May 5th will be an on-boarding session for the platform, to get everyone signed up and familiar with its features and functions. You can join Venturing.Chattanooga.Digital now by clicking here <https://venturing.chattanooga.digital/invites/xQEhVNYuDG>! I will administer it and train others to do so. Chattanooga.Digital will have workshops for the platform (Discourse <https://discourse.org/>) because we’ll provide it to any community group that needs a forum. The platform is quite powerful but also rather generic at the moment. If anyone we want to add content and/or customize it, Chattanooga.Digital can facilitate that. Chattanooga Venturing will continue as a collaborative network to do what Venture did: Channel the voice of the community and connect people to learn and work together. This is something Chattanooga.Digital needs and I suspect others do, too. We need capacity and tools for that. I see an opportunity as well as a need here, so I plan to revive the Facilitator Bank as an entrepreneur through my company, Eduity. We will open source all of the tools, etc., for anyone to use My objective is to build the capabilities for the community and cover my costs; this is not going to be a money-making, exclusive, high-dollar program! If anyone is interested in participating or partnering on the Facilitator Bank, please reach out! The dialogues will shift to a livestream/podcast format after this month. Philip Luckey and I will produce these. We encourage others to join in and replicate them. The format will be “open source” so that anyone can host dialogues in conjunction with or separate from what we’re doing. Chattanooga.Digital will provide apps and services to support this, too, and we will coordinate and share via the Venturing platform. We will be looking for topics, sponsors, and locations. If you have any suggestions, please reach out about that. Thanks, again, for your in-person participation and interest. Let’s take it to the next level! Join the network, continue to connect and share. — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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CVSG Regular Meeting agenda for 3/7
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 7, 2026

April 7, 2026

We have five new members to the group. Welcome! We now have over 70 people on this list! The next regular meeting of the Chattanooga Venturing Study Group will focus on two things: reviving the Facilitator Bank and your objectives. We will also talk about dialogues and online presence. The Chattanooga Facilitator Bank What is it? A group of trained facilitators for the community Where did it come from? Chattanooga Venture! What’s involved? A formal training program, support services, and tools Your learning objectives Review of learning objectives from last meeting How can the Study Group and Facilitator Bank help? Where should we focus our learning? What are key points of engagement? How do we get broader and deeper into the community? Chattanooga Venturing Dialogues Housing dialogue planned for April 27 with CNE Possible dialogue on urban design and development with River City in early June Shift to podcast format with limited in-person audience after that to reduce work required Online presence Venturing.Chattanooga.Digital <https://venturing.chattanooga.digital/> will be the Study Group’s online home. Discussions/forums about relevant topics Content related to Chattanooga Venture and related initiatives Coordinate Facilitator Bank activities Community social network for public purposes Pages on Chattanooga.Digital website for public “front door" Let me know of any other issues or topics to address. I’ll send a final agenda on Monday. — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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A network to apply lessons from Chattanooga Venture
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. April 6, 2026

April 6, 2026

The purpose of the Chattanooga Venturing Study Group is to learn from Venture about how to engage and mobilize community members for inclusive, positive, sustainable change. Participants in the study group represent a wide range of efforts and initiatives to improve our community, which can cause things to be fragmented, inconsistent, and uncoordinated. The power of Venture was its open visioning process coupled with dedication and means to turn talk into action, to make things happen, to instigate change by acting together, collaboratively, including: A bank of trained facilitators to support the process A simple, flexible, fair process for gathering input A team of "connected champions" leading the effort Open, quasi-public spaces Small to large group public goal setting Support and buy-in from those in control of resources Task forces for goals I think the Study Group should refocus on actively applying lessons from Venture, starting with "listening to the voice of the community.” And I think we should intentionally reorganize as a network rather than just an informal, leader-led group. We do not have the resources to create an organization like Venture but we can apply its practices. We can and should do what it did! As a network, we would all work in a connected yet independent manner, informed by and in support of each other. I don’t think we can really learn about Venture without actually doing community venturing. That starts with understanding common challenges and shared visions, with listening to people and letting them know they have been heard, that their input matters. It’s really about connecting, creating, learning, and sharing to achieve our goals, address our issues and needs, tap our opportunities and resources. Right? Reorganizing as a network doesn’t really require a change in what we’re doing, it just means doing it more intentionally and purposively. It means recognizing that we are part of something bigger and more impactful than a specific cause, that all good causes complement each other. The role of the network is to connect various initiatives, to guide and support those that generate community value, that achieve our goals, address our issues and needs, tap our opportunities and resources. The first step is to start listening, to establish the means and process for connecting with people, hearing the voice of the community, identifying challenges and seeing a shared vision. What do you think about refocusing on doing, starting with listening, as a network? Personally, it’s where I want to go and what I plan to invest in. I think it’s still important to preserve knowledge from Venture, and the network should support that, but we should really focus on doing what Venture did without requiring or waiting on a formal organization to do it. We'll discuss on Tuesday but share your thoughts in the meantime! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Learning about Venture by channeling the "Voice of the Community"
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. March 29, 2026

March 29, 2026

In business there is a powerful concept for informing strategy, setting goals and priorities, “The Voice of the Customer,” which expresses customer value, why customers spend money with a company. Let’s think about a parallel concept for the Study Group: “The Voice of the Community.” If you think about it, one reason Chattanooga Venture was so successful was because it channeled to Voice of the Community. The other reason it was successful was because it turned that talk into action. Going forward, I would like to have the Study Group focus on this challenge: How do we channel the Voice of the Community? Where should we go and to whom should we listen? We will start with your learning objectives and projects and intentionally identify, engage, and capture inputs of various stakeholders. Your “job” as Study Group members will be to identify points of engagement: dates & times, locations, stakeholder representatives, etc., to engage community members. We will use Venturing.Chattanooga.Digital <https://venturing.chattanooga.digital/> as our online home for coordinating and discussing this work. What do you think about this? Can you identify points of engagement? This will be the major topic for our next regular meeting on April 7th. In parallel, we will develop means to do the actual listening. We are going to re-establish a Facilitator Bank like Venture had. Members of the bank will go through a learning program about community engagement and facilitation that will involve facilitating multiple “Community Confabs.” We will deploy local, community-based social media platform as a tool for engaging community members, gathering inputs to the Voice of the Community, and sharing results (specifically, we are actively evaluating Friendica <https://friendi.ca/>, an open source, global, decentralized social network, for these purposes). If you’re interested in joining the Facilitator Bank or previewing Friendica, let me know. More on both of those topics soon! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Help on Monday
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. March 20, 2026

March 20, 2026

If anyone is willing to help with set up on Monday, please come to Adelle’s about 4:00 PM. We only have 35 registered guests, so we probably won’t need to do much set up. If you can hang around after 7:00 to help break down, that would be helpful, too! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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Dialogue session on Monday
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. March 18, 2026

March 18, 2026

We have 27 people registered so far folks, so please share with others who might be interested: https://luma.com/kieooku0 is the registration page. This session should be especially interesting for anyone interested in or working on environmental issues. I hope you will join us! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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CVSG goals and objectives
by Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. March 17, 2026

March 17, 2026

Thanks to everyone who shared their learning objectives during our last regular meeting on March 3rd. I got six of the forms back from folks. While these have different particular issues and objectives, all said they wanted to see an overall community vision and for their personal visions to fit within it. If you would like to share your objectives for the group, you can do that by clicking here and completing the brief online form <https://cloud.eduity.net/apps/forms/s/753R2pYTPTMGBsTQoLjC7sXL>. The goals we identified at our January meeting were to: Better understand “the Chattanooga Way,” what Venture did and how it did it by reviewing how it addressed issues in its “commitment portfolio” and how those emerged from its “challenge agenda” and how that agenda was set. Identify questions people have about Venture. Gather input about what people want and value in our community as we do. Connect and engage people representative of our community, particularly those who can engage and speak for various parts of the community, to learn with us. Establish infrastructure to achieve these goals: for capturing historical information about Venture and related initiatives, connecting people to learn, identifying and sharing critical factors for community venturing, maintaining a network of learners. Educate people about Venture and community venturing, raise awareness of the study group, and seek support for our program. The best way to do these things is to apply lessons from Venture, to do them the Chattanooga Way. To that end, I propose the group adapt and adopt Venture’s general approach and set of topics to identify what people see as our challenges as a community and what they would like to see for and in our community: People - care, education, and wellness for all Place - our built and natural environment Play - our arts, culture, and recreation Purchase - our earning and spending power Public - essential services that benefit all Let’s start engaging others in the community in the dialogue, remembering that the overall purpose is to turn talk into action. How should we do this? I’ll provide a general framework based on lessons from Venture at our next regular meeting. Any thoughts you might have would be welcomed in the meantime! PS, who can help with logistics, etc., next Monday? Please, share information about that event and invite others who are interested in the topic to attend! — Greg Laudeman, Ed.D. Executive Officer and Principal Eduity, LLC www.eduity.net greg(a)eduity.net 706-271-5521

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