Lawrence Auls Chairman of MDi has Global Change in mind. I agree wholeheartedly and am determined to it about. - hershel daniels junior

MDi Co Founder
I am determined to bring about lasting change and with the current Chairman of McGraw Daniels, LLC [MDi] we are well positioned to accomplish this.

MDi's Chairman Lawrence Auls was the State of Ohio's first African American statewide computer systems integrator to carry Sun Microsystems and Oracle products and sell their services. This was during the period when FUD ran rampant and an African American owned business was not supposed to do what he was doing. This included a multipaged article in 1975 in Black Enterprise on one of his business ventures.

MDi is poised with this organization, OneCommunity and under his leadership and vision to develop the competitive advantage of the inner city.

Mr. Auls has over 45 years of community, business development, advocacy and negotiations at the ihborhood, municipal, state and national levels. He has said, "At this time in my life I am transferring the gained expertise of myself and others of my generation to the next generation(s) through our initiative of a "Virtual Faculty", and embedding it as means for future generations to do the same."

I've recently become aware that our [MDi's] Chairman and James Houghton the Chairman Emeritus of Corning, Inc. were Aspen fellows together at the then Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (now the Aspen Institute, in the early 70's.

Much of his work are expansions of solutions [including those at MDi] based around the phrase Anticipatory Democracy. The phrase was coined by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, and was expanded on in the 1978 book "Anticipatory Democracy: People in the Politics of the Future", edited by Clement Bezold, Phd. Mr. Auls was a contributing author of a chapter in the book and I hope is writing a historical text of his first hand experience of those days.

Other contributors included former President Jimmy Carter and former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gringrich. In that book, he [Auls] expanded on the thoughts garnered from his personal experience at the first in the United States of America neighborhood planning session that was principally African Americans who where looking 25 years into its future.

While at Aspen and with work at Alvin Toffler's house, he refined his thoughts on early Anticipatory Democracy, which is a theory of civics relying on democratic decision making that takes into account predictions of future events that have credibility with the electorate.

The then Aspen Institute's curriculum has been instrumental in the course of his activity in community change and Anticipatory Democracy. This work is vital to his current research on community change and continues to be a factor in his current work on Anticipatory Democracy.

We are now nearly 40 years from that time and have a new President dedicated to change as is MDi. One of the unfortunate consequences is that over the years Mr. Auls has lost touch with his contemporaries of that day.

I have taken it upon myself to get him in touch with them, with a focus on Mr. Houghton. Although they traveled different paths, each has a legacy and is still building the future with ideals, products and services that serve a global marketplace. In Mr. Auls case, this includes creating a fiber to the home [hence Mr. Houghton of Corning, the fiber cable company] implementation plan of action for the state of Ohio on top of already installed networks as private public partnership to "Erase the Digital Divide in Ohio".

I am looking forward to bringing them all together in a discussion of our mission statement "Erase The Digital Divide" before the next President comes to office and the stimulus package is decided. We feel the times require a conversation on this plan for 2009 implementation.

We expect great things to occur as a result of the type contributions to society by historically enlightened and visionaries like Mr. Auls, Houghton with MDi's President and Chief Engineer Fred Hargrove, Sr. PE, MBA, OneCommuntiy's President Scot M. Rourke and Mark T. Ansboury Senior VP & Chief Technology Officer along with the group that will be in any conversation about "Erasing the Digital Divide" in the United States.