At the 2012 CGA Forum we committed to continue working for two more years to advance these ideas and align as many activities around the region with this strategy as possible.  During the past year we have been working with various groups and their Boards to help them understand the vision and strategy and how to contribute to its implementation.  No one is “managing” the implementation of this vision.  There are many efforts under way and we view our job as keeping everyone informed of what’s happening to foster greater coordination and sharing.

Scenario Framework Monitoring

Our major way of monitoring progress will be to use the scenario framework developed for the workshops.  We have been collecting “evidence” in the form of news stories for various framework events happening or not.  The framework of endstates and events and evidence will be explorable via a custom software tool we have been developing and which will be available shortly.

The blog on the home page of this site will be another way of communicating implementation status as well as summarizing meetings or Forums that we participate in.

The implementation monitoring effort is organized by the categories of events in the scenario framework:

• Demographics, tracking changes in population age and diversity
• Economic Development, including Entrepreneurship, broadband, revitalization
• Recreation, including tourism development
• Promotion, to visitors, business owners, entrepreneurs and new residents
• Agriculture, including animal husbandry and processing
• Arts and Culture as attractions to visitors and enrichment of life for residents
• The Forest, including the State Forest Preserve and private working forest land
• Climate Change, including its effects and our adaptations
• Energy, including biomass, solar and efficiency
• Transportation, including highways and public transport
• Education, including public schools and public and private colleges
• Healthcare, including availability, quality and costs
• Community, including citizen engagement, nonprofit organizations and housing
• Government, including State, County and Local levels
• Regulation, including land use and Article XIV amendments
• The Waters, including water quality improvement, combating invasives and septic

Structure and Purpose of these Sections

The information in the Implementation Status section is dynamic and will change regularly as more specific plans are developed or become known to us. We will be using the Scenario Framework Navigation Tool to provide updates on latest events and news.

As teams assemble to address an issue or need, we can integrate their findings and recommendations into this framework. We will report on progress at next summer’s Common Ground Alliance (CGA) Forum.

One thing that will change regularly will be names of who is working on what.  We are not trying to exclude anyone. Our knowledge is still very limited about who is working on what and we will update the major efforts we find out about in subsequent versions.  Please get in touch with us if you are working on something we should all know about.  And if your name should not be included, just let us know.

• Specific implementation steps or projects are identified by bullets

We plan on meeting with as many local leaders and citizens, state agencies and private and NGO organizations as possible to enrich the strategy, add detail to this plan and understand each one’s areas of interest.