The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) and Near-Time Announce New Approach to Building Innovative Workforce Development Partnerships

CHAPEL HILL, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Near-Time and the Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) announced a new approach to building innovative workforce development partnerships. Open Source Workforce Development (OSWD) fosters the collaborative engagement of loosely coupled regional business leaders with the goal of building a workforce with 21^st century skills. The OSWD methodology is based on the concept of "Strategic Doing" which was pioneered by I-Open to solve complex economic development challenges.

Near-Time is a leading enterprise 2.0 platform for content publishing, community building and cross organizational collaboration. It is increasingly being used by a range of economic development, trade and entrepreneurial organizations to offer a hub for information exchange, membership support and knowledge sharing.

“We are thrilled to extend our partnership with I-Open. Open source workforce development promises to accelerate job training and economic development through grass roots collaboration,” said Reid Conrad, CEO of Near-Time.

The Open Source Workforce Development concept was conceived to offer a solution to the emerging reality that the nation is facing a major skills shortage. As the Baby Boom generation retires, more businesses are facing shortages across many industry sectors. In order to meet these shortages, communities and regions will need to innovate. They will need to “link and leverage” their assets across organizational and political boundaries in order to succeed, especially during an economic downturn.

The "Strategic Doing" process focuses on the discipline of identifying a few key transformative initiatives and then engaging diverse community or region participants to make real impacts quickly.

“Competitive communities and regions need new approaches to integrate their education, economic development and workforce development investments,” according to Ed Morrison, Director of I-Open. Morrison also serves as Economic Policy Advisor to the Purdue Center for Regional Development. “We need fast, responsive initiatives to deliver the skills that globally competitive businesses demand.”

“The Near-Time platform provides us the power and the simplicity we need to make strategic doing a reality,” remarked Morrison. “The platform has fully integrated functionality that promotes collaboration, not simply social networking. It does not require any programming to customize, includes both public and non-public pages that can be turned on and off page-by-page and incorporates a powerful system of categories and tags to filter information. The platform integrates an e-commerce engine so emerging networks can become self-sustaining and allows for sub-networks to form easily within networks. Near-Time provides the simplicity to meet the needs of the Baby Boomers and the power to keep sophisticated young adults engaged.”

About I-Open

The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) is a non-profit, 501 (c) (3) corporation based in Cleveland, Ohio. I-Open promotes the development of new network-based approaches to economic development and workforce development for communities and regions. These approaches use Near-Time to leverage the collaborative power of the Internet.

About Near-Time

Near-Time is a leading on-demand, Enterprise 2.0 platform for cross organization collaboration. Business professionals can quickly create rich interaction with their prospects, customers, partners and suppliers. Near-Time integrates wikis, weblogs and forums to enable groups to work together more effectively in a secure, hosted environment. Thousands of organizations in over forty nations use Near-Time to maximize internal and external collaboration and publishing. Near-Time's patent pending Premium service leverages the Near-Time platform to enable organizations to monetize their communities and content. For more information, go to http://www.near-time.com/.