Bill Merrill

In the last few years, I’ve spent more time riding the hard wooden benches in the Ann Arbor city council chambers than I have straddling the teeter totter board. So last month I was glad to have a chance to take a ride with Bill Merrill, a software developer I met for the first time four or five years ago on a Ride Around Town (RAT). That was a monthly event that the Washtenaw Bicycling and Walking Coalition used to sponsor.

If Merrill had ever addressed the Ann Arbor city council during public commentary, then he could have reasonably begun by saying something like, “I came to Ann Arbor to attend school, but I stayed. And I’ve owned my house across from Allmendinger Park for almost a decade.”

This would, of course, be a standard gambit for public commentary – not just in Ann Arbor but probably in most every community – establishing your bona fides by appealing to longevity and rootedness in the community.

Home ownership is not just a way of saying to Ann Arbor city councilmembers that you’ve been here long enough to count. It’s also a way of saying, “I’m one of you.” All 11 members of the council are homeowners, even though less than half of Ann Arbor residents own the place they live.

In my time covering the city council for The Chronicle, Merrill has never addressed that body during the time allowed for public commentary. In that way he is like most other Ann Arbor homeowners – or for that matter, renters. Most of them, like Merrill, do not ever in their lifetime head down to city hall on the first or third Monday of the month to tell the city council what they think.

But the fact that he’s now sold his house and left Ann Arbor – even though he’s not leaving to take a job somewhere else or to follow a spouse, or for any other specific reason – makes Merrill different. It makes him different in a way that is likely not what the Pure Michigan campaign had in mind with its Ann Arbor slogan: “Ann Arbor does it up different.” That advertisement is supposed to make the “talent” want to come live here, not pick up and leave for no particular reason.

Merrill has more options than most people. He earns his livelihood working on software for a virtual cable operator Zattoo – a company with customers mostly in Germany and Switzerland, with the slogan “Internet TV Anywhere.” And it turns out that Merrill can do his job with Zattoo anywhere – including not in Ann Arbor. On why he decided to head out west for a while, Merrill had this to say on the totter:

The way I kind of think about it, it’s work anywhere to maintain your life, and make friends, and do things. I have been running the Ann Arbor game for a long time – which is meeting the new cool people who come to town, becoming friends with them, and then saying goodbye when they shoot out the other end to wherever they’re going. And every year you have a couple of really good friends who take off, and it hurts. And so I just want to try a different game. I also want to try living in a big city. Secondarily, I’m excited to try living without a car. …

I’m going to go live in places where my friends are and see what they are like and see if I get tired of living out of a couple of bags. I imagine eventually I will settle down somewhere. So my plan right now is in Seattle, then San Francisco, then I don’t know what is next.

From the point of view of “economic development,” Merrill probably still counts as a success story – because Ann Arbor managed to retain him for around a decade, instead of losing him immediately after graduation.

Whether a guy like Merrill stays or leaves Ann Arbor ultimately isn’t up to other folks  – like me, for example – who’ll likely serve out their productive lives here. But I think we’d probably “do it up” better if we measured success not by how long people like Bill Merrill choose to stay, but by how open we are to hearing their thoughts while they’re here – whether that’s a short time or forever.

I’d like to hear someone introduce their remarks to the city council by saying, “Hello, I live here now, and that’s all that matters.”

For more details on Merrill’s television-watching habits, smartphone replacement strategy, and transit preferences, read Merrill’s complete Talk.

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Chris Carey of JunketSleuth.

Even if all you do is stare right into your own belly button, you can still wind up thinking about drinking too much Diet Coke out of a hotel minibar in Tel Aviv.

Let’s start close to home, at 618 S. Main St. in Ann Arbor, Mich. That’s where local developer Dan Ketelaar is currently planning a six-story residential project – it will consist of about 180 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments.

It’s also the former location of Fox Tent & Awning.

Gazing into my navel, I think of Teeter Talk’s history with that business. Back in 2007, I pedaled my bicycle trailer, loaded with a wooden teeter totter, into Fox Tent & Awning. There, Lynda, Don, and Diane measured out and sewed together a custom canvas cover for the totter plus trailer rig. Teeter Talk was ready to leave my back yard. It was ready to travel.

That’s right, travel. Ever wonder how much the U.S. government spends on travel to Ann Arbor? Maybe you never wondered that because you figured the answer is hard to find.

Yet in about 15 minutes, using an online searchable repository of federal travel records available on JunketSleuth.com, here’s what I learned: For a roughly three-year period from 2008 to 2010, at least $847,970 in federal money from 11 different federal agencies was spent on 970 trips to Ann Arbor, Mich. [Google Spreadsheet with summary Ann Arbor JunketSleuth data]

Chris Carey is editor and president of BailoutSleuth.com, which operates JunketSleuth. And Carey lives in Ann Arbor, so it worked out that he was able to join me as a guest on the teeter totter back in mid-October.

Now, the financier of the enterprise, Mark Cuban, is to my knowledge not fascinated with a little college town like ours. So the point of the JunketSleuth enterprise is not to document federal spending on travel to Ann Arbor. JunketSleuth describes itself as an “independent Web-based news site aimed at exposing travel patterns of U.S. government employees.” So JunketSleuth.com is more interested in looking at the travel patterns of people – people like Securities and Exchange Commissioner Kathleen Casey, whose bill at a Tel Aviv Hilton Hotel included (for one day) $24 worth of Coke and Diet Coke.

Custom-made canvas cover for the teeter totter, sewn by Fox Tent & Awning (File photo.)

To summarize, traveling from my belly button to Tel Aviv cost you right around 350 words – a real bargain by Chronicle standards. For readers whose final destination is actually Carey’s complete Talk, thanks for flying with The Chronicle. At your final destination, you’ll find topics like the challenges facing journalists today, how Carey wound up in Ann Arbor, and what he has in common with Chronicle sports columnist John U. Bacon.

For those who are continuing with us here on The Chronicle, I’ve pulled one theme out of his Talk to highlight here: the culture of spending taxpayer money.

Culture of Spending: Diet Coke

On the totter, JunketSleuth’s Chris Carey allowed that the $24 worth of Coke and Diet Coke charged in one day to the Tel Aviv Hilton by Securities and Exchange commissioner Kathleen Casey was not a major scandal.

And after dismounting from the totter, I’ve now had nearly two months to reflect on all that Diet Coke. It made me thirsty – thirsty to know how much Diet Coke $24 will buy from the Tel Aviv Hilton. Two liters? A 12-pack? A pony keg? I actually made a couple of calls, but the result of that high-minded journalistic effort did not yield a definitive answer.

Frankly, I don’t think it’d be completely out of line for the Tel Aviv Hilton to charge guests $3 per can of Diet Coke. That works out to eight cans for $24. Based on my own daily consumption of Diet Coke and other caffeine products, that’s a lot, but not a crazy amount. (Oh, c’mon, it’s really not.)

Returnable empties get stored next to the recyclables at The Chronicle.

And I could imagine a scenario where you need to buy the Diet Coke at the price the Hilton charges instead of from a convenience store, because it was between meetings, you were crunched for time and decided to buy a bunch to cover yourself for anticipated future thirst, too.

Though perhaps not a scandal in itself, Carey pointed during his Talk to the mindset that might be suggested by the Diet Coke and other charges accumulated by Ms. Casey. To me, it suggests a mindset and a culture that does not always seek out the least expensive alternative when traveling – maybe because somebody else (taxpayers like you and me) is paying. And there’s likely no specific reward for leaving money unspent in the travel budget. It’s not like we taxpayers are going to ask for it back, are we?

So what Chris Carey and the rest of the JunketSleuth staff are basically doing, on taxpayers’ behalf, is asking for our money back. And it’s good that they are asking. Now, the answer might be: No, you can’t have it, now or in the future, and here’s why. I think it’s okay if the answer is no – if it’s supplemented by a very good story explaining why not.

But the answer isn’t going to be yes, unless somebody at least asks the question. If nobody asks the question, then it’ll always be okay to spend all the money available.

Culture of Spending: Millage Money

Spending all the money available is a mindset that I think is entrenched locally in Ann Arbor every bit as much as it is anywhere else. Whether that’s part of Ann Arbor city culture for travel spending is hard to say. More on that in a minute. But this spend-it-all mindset does surface occasionally at the city council table.

To see this, consider a scenario that clearly doesn’t apply to Ann Arbor. Suppose City A has no garbage collection service. Voters in City A decide to place a tax on themselves that’s sufficient for curbside garbage collection services every other week. Before the vote, it’s discussed by the community that adequate service would be every other week, but that’s not a part of the actual ballot language. Then it turns out that garbage collectors can be hired and trucks can be purchased much cheaper that originally thought. In fact, it can be done so much cheaper that service could be offered once a week instead of once every two weeks.

Question: Does the city return the excess to the taxpayers, or simply decide to provide service at twice the level that everyone had agreed was adequate?

I don’t think that question has an obvious answer. But there’s no doubt it’s a fair question. And it’s easy to concede that it’s a fair question, because we don’t live in City A, right?

Oh, but we actually do. Swap in Ann Arbor’s open space preservation millage (aka greenbelt milage) for City A’s garbage collection tax, and now we have a reasonable analogy.

The city council gave initial consideration at its Nov. 21 meeting to the question of whether to expand the set of properties eligible for preservation under the greenbelt millage. At that meeting, Carsten Hohnke – the council representative to the greenbelt advisory commission – noted that the per-acre cost of preserving land had has dropped to half what it was in 2003, when voters approved the 0.5 mill tax for the next 30 years. Also noted at the meeting was the fact that there are many more organizations working on land preservation efforts than existed back in 2003, when the city of Ann Arbor was in some sense going it alone.

In terms of soda, it’d be like Kathleen Casey finding out that the Diet Coke costs $18 instead of $24. Now what? Leave the $6 unspent? Spend the $6 on additional Diet Coke? Spend it on Coke Zero? Spend it on some nut-based snacks? (As it turns out, JunketSleuth reported that on the same day Casey bought the $24 of Coke products from the Tel Aviv Hilton, she also bought $12 worth of almonds and cashews.) Spend it on something that you know you can’t eat, and just throw it in the garbage?

Of course, garbage collection is a lot different from preserving open space. But we’ve apparently got a situation where the goals that Ann Arbor set out to accomplish with the greenbelt program might be achievable at a lower financial cost than we originally thought. So, do we still spend all the money available? Or do we think about possibly reducing the amount that is levied? Or do we think about asking voters if they’d be willing to approve redirecting some of that preservation millage money on the maintenance of existing city park facilities?

If voters said yes to that redirection, then under the administrative policy of the council enacted on May 16, 2011, the proceeds of the greenbelt millage would “count” as general fund spending on city parks – for the purposes of a different policy requirement that general fund spending on parks not decrease relative to other areas of the budget. And that, in turn, would free up general fund money to be spent on something besides city parks. Like firefighters and police officers, for example.

But we could argue about that. It wouldn’t be crazy to say that if we’re going to vote to redirect open space preservation dollars to city park maintenance, then the desired effect should be to bolster the quality of our park system, not bolster the quality of our public safety services. In any case, we could debate it – if the right questions get asked.

So it was nice to see that first, basic question asked on Nov. 21, at the meeting when the council undertook its initial deliberations on expanding the greenbelt boundaries. It was councilmember Jane Lumm who essentially raised the issue, when she asked, in so many words: Are we just trying to spend all the money? At the Nov. 21 meeting, Marcia Higgins joined Lumm in questioning the greenbelt boundary expansion.

But on that occasion, neither Higgins or Lumm put the question of boundary expansion in the context of specific alternatives – like asking voters to approve a reduction in the 0.5 mill levy or asking voters to approve redirecting a portion of future funds levied under the millage to city park maintenance. This isn’t some novel, creative suggestion I came up with. The idea of making that request of voters was floated at a December 2009 city council budget retreat. And the idea of asking voters for authorization to redirect a portion of greenbelt millage funds was discussed in a bit more detail at a city council budget work session in early 2010. Especially at the work session, it was Higgins who pressed the issue.

It’s conceivable that Higgins and Lumm could press the issue further when councilmembers consider the matter at their second and final vote on the greenbelt boundary expansion – likely to take place at the council’s Dec. 5 meeting. Based on deliberations preceding the initial vote, however, the majority of councilmembers will not be inclined to consider the broader context of the entire city budget in connection with the greenbelt boundary expansion.

And that’s because the city council is out of the habit of asking the question: Are we just going to spend all the available money?

Culture of Spending: Ann Arbor P-Cards

What would the equivalent of JunketSleuth be for local Ann Arbor government? Getting access to one chunk of city data – P-Card transaction data – would not require the kind of extensive Freedom of Information Act requests that JunketSleuth has made in order to compile its online database.

Along with myriad other data sets, information on the city’s P-Card (purchase cards) transactions is available through the city’s Data Catalog. The P-Card data includes records of over 12,000 transactions, some of which are travel-related. The transaction amounts are, according to city policy, limited to dollar amounts under $3,000. The cards are subject to other constraints on use as well. One constraint is that P-Cards cannot be pooled by employees to circumvent the cap.

According to city accounting services manager Karen Lancaster, roughly 100 cards are in circulation. Individual cards can be tailored for daily or monthly limits or by type of merchant. For example, if an employee were issued a P-Card for some specific type of purchase related to their job, then other uses – for travel or food, or computer purchases – could be prohibited as part of the card’s configuration. [.pdf of city policy on P-Cards]

For the year ending June 30, 2010, the city’s auditor contended that the city appeared to be in violation of established administrative policy and financial management procedures or applicable state laws for maintaining documentation of P-Card purchases.

The auditor concluded that the city may have paid for transactions “without ever reviewing the statement or any supporting receipt to authorize the purchase and determine that there was a business purpose for the transaction.” While the city concurred with the auditor’s recommendation for better documentation, it pointed to the control in place at the level of an employee’s supervisor, who is responsible for signing off on a purchase, before it is forwarded to the accounting department. [.pdf of city of Ann Arbor audit report for the year ending June 30, 2010]

The explicit business purpose of the P-Card transactions is not part of the Data Catalog records. Each P-Card record in the Data Catalog currently includes three data fields: date, merchant name, transaction amount. And that presents a barrier to be overcome by a member of the public interested in monitoring travel expenses by looking at P-Card data. You’d need to be able to identify travel expenses through merchant names – which is not impossible, but would be somewhat tedious.

Another barrier to monitoring travel expenses through P-Card data is the sheer number of records – over 12,000 of them. That’s too large a set for some free tools (like Google Documents, in my experience) to process without crashing.

Screenshot extract for Nov. 29, 2011 from A2OpenBook for Expenses by Service Area » SAFETY SERVICES AREA » POLICE SERVICES » Personnel Services. Among other lines, it shows an annual budgeted amount for police overtime of $968,806, with $454,252 or 47% of it spent, at a point 151 days or about 42% of the way into the fiscal year. (Image links to A2OpenBook)

However, both barriers look to be overcome sometime soon.

According to Lancaster, P-Card data is on the city’s work plan for conversion to the city’s A2OpenBook platform – which allows the public to monitor the city’s expenditures and revenues by fund, by vendor and by purpose. That should eliminate the need to deal with 12,000 records all in one go.

Lancaster also indicated in an email to The Chronicle that as part of the move to A2OpenBook, she believes that adding the category of the expense to each P-Card record (materials and supplies, travel, etc.) “is definitely something we can do.”

I’m looking forward to that. It’s a step towards eliminating the need for citizens to file requests under the Freedom of Information Act and is entirely consistent with president Barack Obama’s Jan. 21, 2009 memo on FOIA, which reads in relevant part:

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Speaking of “disclosure,” in case anyone was teetering on the edge of their seat: No, I’m not going to disclose the other things I found in my belly button while working on this column. But you’ll find other, more pleasant kinds of disclosures in Chris Carey’s Teeter Talk – and I think it’s definitely worth the trip.

Jim Ottaviani – University of Michigan librarian and graphic novel author. His latest book is "Feynman," a biography of physicist Richard Feynman.

For  a graphic novel with a title like “Feynman,” my smart-aleck reflex is to pronounce the word silently to myself with deliberately wayward stress – so the final vowel gets its full flavor, instead of an unstressed schwa.

That way, it patterns with Superman, Spiderman, Aquaman, Ironman, Batman and other comic book heros. And that allows me to wonder what special powers this Feynman might have, how he got those powers, what his home planet was …

Of course, the Feynman in Jim Ottaviani’s recently published graphic novel is actually not a comic book hero. It’s Richard Feynman, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work on quantum physics. (So Feynman’s home planet was Earth, you see.)

Ottaviani explained during his teeter totter ride a couple of weeks ago that he’d not intended the title of his most recent graphic novel to be a word play. It was the publisher who had chosen the title, when Ottaviani had “punted” on that task.

Soon after talking with me on the totter, Ottaviani left town for a book tour. He’ll be back in Ann Arbor in a couple of weeks when he gives a talk on “Feynman” in the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library Gallery, on Oct. 13, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.

To prepare for his talk, you can buy “Feynman” at Nicola’s Books.

To me, the most interesting part of my conversation with Ottaviani involved the graphic novel as a mechanism for telling a story – in the case of “Feynman,” it’s a physicist’s biography. There’s nothing particularly novel about that – Ottaviani has covered scientific subject matter before in comic book form. His previous work includes a number of books that contain episodes from the lives of Feynman, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Marie Curie, among others.

But that led me to contemplate a different idea. What if one of the staples of Chronicle coverage, a government meeting report, were presented in the form of a graphic novel?

Ottaviani’s reaction to the idea: “Do that, please, is all I can say.” At least the title of that comic book (with apologies to Sabra Briere, Margie Teall, Sandi Smith and Marcia Higgins) would be straightforward: “Councilman.”

Though I can’t draw, I did take a shot at creating two panels of “Councilman.”

(Image links to higher resolution file) Councilmembers were in the middle of a routine vote ...

... when suddenly a strange electricity filled the chambers. Had the city's CFO, Tom Crawford, been rubbing a balloon on his head again? It seemed to be more intense than that ...

The images in those panels are constrained by the limits of my “artistic” ability as expressed with software made by Adobe. That’s not how Ottaviani works, of course. He describes each panel in detail, and that description is eventually handed off to the illustrator, who actually draws what Ottaviani has visualized. The illustrator for “Feynman” was Leland Myrick.

How big a project would a city-council-meeting-as-graphic-novel be? The last city council report published in The Chronicle came in around 13,000 words. A rule of thumb for comic book panels, Ottaviani told me, is that each panel should have about 35 words of dialogue. That would work out to 370 panels – if every word in the report were included as dialogue. But clearly, not every word would need to be included as dialogue. Much of the meaning could be conveyed through the illustrations.

In thinking about how to make a comic book out of a city council meeting, I paused to reflect on how The Chronicle approaches meeting coverage. While we include a considerable amount of descriptive detail about the meetings, as well as background to orient the reader, there’s also a lot of material that gets pared away.

Some of the material that gets pared away might be arguably be less important than material we include. For example, why include a photo of a helium balloon trapped against the ceiling of the city council chambers (with a joke caption), but not a description of a liquor license transfer? After riding the totter with Ottaviani, I was rummaging around the Internet for some information about Feynman, and found a succinct answer to that question. It’s in Richard Feynman’s lecture, delivered on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize. From his introductory remarks:

I shall include details of anecdotes which are of no value either scientifically, nor for understanding the development of ideas. They are included only to make the lecture more entertaining.

Included in Feynman’s introductory remarks is the expression of another basic tenet of Chronicle reporting – we’re committed to telling readers what we did to “get to do the work.” So if we had to email or call a source after the meeting, in order to pin down a fact, we’ll tell readers that up front. We think our reports are a plenty dignified way to tell readers exactly what we did. If we didn’t attend a meeting, we won’t report on it as if we did. In Feynman’s Nobel lecture, he puts it this way:

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover all the tracks … So there isn’t any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work … So, what I would like to tell you about today are the sequence of events, really the sequence of ideas, which occurred, and by which I finally came out the other end with an unsolved problem for which I ultimately received a prize.

Jim Ottaviani’s complete Talk is worth a read. If you’d prefer to see him talk live, in person, he’ll be talking about “Feynman” at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Library Gallery, on Oct. 13, 2011 at 5:30 p.m.

Dante Chinni, co-athor of "Our Patchwork Nation." That's a Tigers cap he's wearing, and it's not accidental.

“I don’t want to be another city. I resent the fact that we are compared to other cities when projects are being proposed.”

That was Ali Ramlawi, owner of the Jerusalem Garden on South Fifth Avenue in downtown Ann Arbor, addressing the April 4, 2011 meeting of the Ann Arbor city council. He was criticizing the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority, and advocating against a proposed conference center and hotel project on the Library Lot – the council voted the project down later that evening.

“Ann Arbor will change … but it won’t become Detroit.”

That was Dante Chinni, while riding the the teeter totter on my front porch last Thursday afternoon. Chinni has made it part of his job to compare communities like Ann Arbor – Washtenaw County, actually – to other places in the country.

Who is Dante Chinni? And why should Ann Arbor care what he thinks?

On his website, Chinni describes himself as a “a card-carrying member of the East Coast Media Industrial Complex.” The part of his job that lets him compare one place to another – in a statistically sophisticated way – is a project Chinni conceived called Patchwork Nation. It’s funded by the Knight Foundation. The effort has already produced a book, which he co-authored with James Gimpel: “Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth about the ‘Real’ America.”

Washtenaw County is featured in the chapter that introduces readers to the concept of a “Campus and Careers” community type. The classification, as well as a read through Dante’s Talk, confirm that mostly what defines Ann Arbor – at least for people on the outside looking in – is its place as the home of the University of Michigan. And certainly for people on the inside, it’s difficult to argue that UM isn’t currently the single most important institution in the community.

But some insiders – and by this I mean not just people who live, work and play here, but actual Ann Arbor insiders – are starting to float the question of what else Ann Arbor might aspire to be besides home to “the most profound educational institution in the Midwest.”

Vision of Ann Arbor: Non-Physical (DDA Partnerships)

“The most profound educational institution in the Midwest” was David Di Rita’s description of UM, which came in the context of a meeting of the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority’s partnerships committee on Wednesday morning, April 13. Di Rita, a principal with the Roxbury Group, served as a consultant on the RFP review process for the Library Lot, which the city council terminated two weeks ago.

The partnerships committee meeting was one of insiders – both at the committee table and in the audience.

At the table besides Di Rita were: DDA board members John Mouat, Russ Collins, Gary Boren, Sandi Smith, Bob Guenzel and John Splitt, along with Susan Pollay, executive director of the DDA, and city councilmember Tony Derezinski. Invited to the table mid-meeting were Josie Parker, executive director of the Ann Arbor District Library – who brought along AADL board member Nancy Kaplan – and Jesse Bernstein, chair of the Ann Arbor Transportation Authority board.

In the audience sat other easily recognizable names: Vivienne Armentrout (former Washtenaw County commissioner), Peter Allen (developer), Mary Hathaway (prominent activist for peace and social justice), Alice Ralph (former candidate for county board, city council, and author of a community commons proposal for the Library Lot), Tom Wieder (local attorney and long-time city Democratic Party activist), John Floyd (former candidate for city council), and Sabra Briere (city councilmember).

Part of the committee’s agenda was a discussion of how to approach beginning a process that the city council has agreed to let the DDA lead. The process could result in the development of different uses for four city-owned downtown parcels currently used for surface parking: the Kline Lot on South Ashley, the Palio Lot at Main and William, the old Y Lot at Fifth and William; and the Library Lot on South Fifth. The Library Lot is actually currently a construction site – the DDA is building a roughly 640-space underground parking garage on the site. [Chronicle coverage: "Ann Arbor Council Focuses on Downtown"]

Bernstein weighed in for a process that would begin with figuring out a vision: Where do we aspire to be in 30 years? He pointed to the AATA’s process of developing a transit master plan – still in the works – as an example of that kind of approach. [Chronicle coverage: "'Smart Growth' to Fuel Countywide Transit" ]

Parker shared some of the hurdles that are inherent in the library’s future plans for its downtown building – plans that are currently on hold. Those challenges involve the historical relationship between the library and the Ann Arbor Public Schools (the district has a right of first refusal on any offer to sell the building) and the need to ask voters to increase the library millage in order to fund a new building. [Chronicle coverage: "Citing Economy, Board Halts Library Project"]

Remarks from Mouat, a DDA board member, seemed to resonate with Allen, a developer seated in the audience. [Allen has long called for the master planning of the whole area around the Library Lot, not just the Library Lot itself. Chronicle coverage: "Column: Visions for the Library Lot"]

Mouat suggested that the process could include developing a vision for Ann Arbor that is not physical. To explain what he meant, Mouat noted that Austin is known as a “music capital” and Boulder is known as a “recreation capital.” Ann Arbor, he said, is known as the home of the University of Michigan – but what is Ann Arbor beyond the university? he asked. He said that for his part, he could imagine Ann Arbor becoming some kind of “food capital.”

Vision of Ann Arbor: Third Base, Caboose, Engine

Compared to Mouat’s vision of an Ann Arbor that is distinctive, but not based on the presence of the university, Di Rita’s take on Ann Arbor seemed closer to building that vision based on the university connection. In assessing the Library Lot location, he noted that its three major advantages are: (1) the nearby location of other institutions – the library and the transit center; (2) the nearby location of the restaurant and entertainment district; (3) the short walk to the university.

Di Rita sees Ann Arbor as being born to hit a triple – now it’s standing on third base. The question is: Does it want to run home? Ann Arbor could really take things to the next level, he said, but the question is whether there’s a community desire to do that. He said that based on the major stakeholders in the community he’d spoken with, there’s support among them to head towards home plate.

Di Rita noted that one of the things that makes Ann Arbor distinct is that even a person who lives out on Scio Church Road might have strong objections to a proposal for downtown Ann Arbor. In other cities, he said, it’s sometimes the case that only the immediately adjacent neighbors have objections. But that’s not the way Ann Arbor works, he said, and you have to “play the ball where it lies.”

Di Rita sees growth for Ann Arbor, even if it just stands on third base as far as its vision for itself – buildings are going to get built, he said.

Dante Chinni didn’t attend the partnerships committee meeting – by then he had returned to Washington, D.C. But I can imagine him agreeing with at least some of what Di Rita had to say. To Chinni, the most salient and distinctive part of Ann Arbor is the university. And he sees Ann Arbor’s growth as fueled by growth at the university. The Patchwork Nation analysis slots Washtenaw County into the “Campus and Career” community type. But Ann Arbor is surely much more than just the university, right? What does Chinni know – he’s not from here.

But Chinni actually is from here – or more accurately, from around these parts: He grew up in Warren. So he’s at least not as susceptible as other east-coast media types to thinking of Michigan as one place, typified by Detroit. From his Talk:

I mean, most people who don’t live here view Michigan as Detroit. They don’t even really think of the northern part of Michigan. And when you tell them that, Oh, no the county right next door to it, the unemployment rate is really only about, what 6 or 7 percent …

When Chinni was in town two years ago, Ann Arbor was being described by our local officials as a life preserver for the rest of the state. A couple of weeks ago, at a different meeting of Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority board members, mayor John Hieftje described the state of Michigan as a train, headed over a cliff. But Ann Arbor was the caboose, Hieftje said, so we’d be the last to go over the cliff.

On the totter, Chinni and I agreed that maybe that train metaphor needs tweaking a bit – instead of a caboose, maybe Ann Arbor should be compared to an engine hooked to the other end pulling Michigan’s train away from the cliff. Specifically in the recovery of Detroit, Chinni sees a role for Ann Arbor:

This is what I think is going to happen: It’s not going to be that Ann Arbor’s just going to grow and grow and get really big and Detroit is to get smaller and smaller and smaller and all the people to move out here. Ann Arbor is going to become a bigger and bigger economic force and eventually that will rub off on Detroit.

And as Ann Arbor becomes a bigger and bigger economic force, Chinni thinks Ann Arbor will change:

Ann Arbor will change as part of that, but it won’t become Detroit. If Ann Arbor is successful at helping Detroit become what it can become, Ann Arbor will change, too. People who don’t think it’s been a change, Ann Arbor has changed since 1980. It has. I know people here don’t want to hear that, but it has changed. It is not the same city as it was back then. I mean politically, the student body has changed – it’s a different place.

So as Ann Arbor changes, I think it’s worth asking if the residents of Ann Arbor will be able to reach a consensus on a vision of this place that might help guide that change. And it looks like an attempt to find that consensus will be part of the DDA-led process to look at those four downtown parcels.

I hope that people who participate in the process along the way are prepared to accept that the community consensus vision might be different from their personal vision.

Patchwork Politics

It’s worth noting that Patchwork Nation is not a project borne out of desire to help Ann Arbor figure out its vision. It was born out of a desire to understand politics in the U.S. on a more detailed level than the red-state/blue-state maps the media tends to use around election time.

That goal led Chinni to take a county-by-county approach, which resulted in an analysis of each U.S. county as one of 12 types: Boom Towns, Campus and Careers, Emptying Nests, Evangelical Epicenters, Immigration Nation, Industrial Metropolis, Military Bastions, Minority Central, Monied Burbs, Mormon Outposts, Service Worker Centers, Tractor Country. [For interactive maps of the Patchwork analysis, visit the Patchwork Nation website.]

I’ve written about the book before, when then-candidate for mayor Steve Bean graced the other end of the teeter totter last fall.

As Chinni pointed out during his ride, everything that’s said about the community types is more true of the type than it is about individual places categorized by a type.

Still, I think it’s natural for anyone who picks up the book to find their own community and decide if Chinni and Gimpel got it right. What will also be interesting to see is if the Patchwork approach begins to serve as a reliable tool for getting more insight into national-level politics.

On the totter, Chinni described how he’ll be partnering with the PBS Newshour on upcoming 2012 election coverage, offering insight on those races from the Patchwork point of view. It’s possible we’ll start to see the Patchwork analysis seep into the approach taken by the media to its election coverage and analysis for the 2012 cycle.

For Chinni’s views in more detail and context, read Dante Chinni’s Talk.

Last week, Robb Johnston rode the AATA bus from Ypsilanti into Ann Arbor and walked from downtown to my front porch take his turn on the teeter totter. [Robb Johnston's Talk]

Johnston has written and illustrated a self-published children’s book called “The Woodcutter and The Most Beautiful Tree.” And whenever anyone pitches me Chronicle coverage of a project they’re proud of, my first thought is: “Can I get a teeter totter ride out of this?”

Before Johnston’s ride, I test-read his children’s book the best way I could think of, given that my wife Mary and I do not have children: I read the book aloud to her, and did my best to pretend that she was four years old. It was my own first read through the book, so I was satisfied when I did not stumble too badly over the part of the woodcutter’s refrain that goes, “Thwickety THWAK, Thwickety THWAK.”

Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” notwithstanding, I think it’s fair to expect that a children’s book with a title like “The Woodcutter and The Most Beautiful Tree” will end well and leave everyone with smiles all around. And it does. So it’s not like I was truly surprised when I turned that one page near the end that reveals exactly how the final encounter between The Most Beautiful Tree and the Woodcutter ends.

But the book’s text and its illustrations pull the reader along to that point, and suggest so unmistakably a dark and dreadful ending, that when I did turn that page, I gulped a genuine breath of relief that she did not wind up getting milled into lumber at the end. [The tree in Johnston's book is female.] Well, yes, you might conclude that I am just that dopey. Or more generously, you might try sometime reading aloud a book you’ve never seen before.

But speaking of things we’ve seen before, some Chronicle readers might be thinking: Haven’t we seen this guy Robb Johnston before? Why yes, you have.

Once Johnston arrived for his totter ride, pre-tottering conversation revealed how The Chronicle had previously encountered him. In April 2010, in his capacity as a temporary city worker in Ann Arbor’s natural area preservation (NAP) program, he had been helping a group of volunteers clear brush on the Argo earthen berm. I’d run past on the path and stopped to inquire in hey-mister-whatcha-doing fashion. And I’d logged the encounter as a Stopped.Watched. item – he’s mentioned there by first name only.

Later when I searched through The Chronicle’s archives for “Robb,” I learned that a few days before the Argo encounter, we’d published an article about the controlled burns conducted by NAP, which mentioned Johnston and includes a photograph of him.

Johnston is currently on his regular extended break from the city, which is part of what defines him as a temporary worker. He’ll start back in a few weeks.

This totter-ride encounter with a city worker, in his guise as a children’s book author, reminded me of some text that was included in the original About The Chronicle section, when we launched this publication in September 2008 [the text has been revised since then]:

… every day we encounter eccentric, enterprising, or regular people doing the remarkable or even the routine.

My recollection is that the sentiment was meant to reflect the idea that our appointed and elected officials are regular people, whose work for the public is a part of the routine – and that’s exactly why it’s worth documenting, just as other routine activity by regular folks is also important to document.

To be clear, Johnston does not strike me as eccentric. He comes across as a regular guy. And he’s now found his way into The Chronicle doing both the routine (his job as a city worker) and the remarkable (writing and illustrating a children’s book).

I’d like to wrap up this introduction to Johnston’s Talk by making a suggestion to those Chronicle readers who still think that an actual children’s book is a routine part of childhood that makes for remarkable memories. You know the kind – a big book that small hands can still handle, with painstakingly hand-drawn illustrations, the kind that you can read aloud and turn pages together with your kid or your spouse, if you don’t have kids. That suggestion is this: Buy the book and read it to a kid. And there’s no reason to wait for Christmas – it has a Christmas ending, but I wouldn’t call it a Christmas book.

For readers who’d prefer not to order online, it’s available at two bricks-and-mortar locations: Vault of Midnight at 219 S. Main St. in downtown Ann Arbor, and Fun 4 All on 2742 Washtenaw Ave.

In thinking about how to read this particular book to children, I’d like to share an insight: I’m pretty sure think that reading this book on a teeter totter with a child would be a mistake. Depending on the child’s ability to appreciate irony, awkward questions could arise: Isn’t this board made out of a tree? Did a woodcutter chop her down to make this teeter totter?!

What, if anything, is there to say to that? Sorry, kid, but not every tree is The Most Beautiful Tree. So maybe it’s better to just choose a comfortable chair.

Last Thursday afternoon, I wheeled the mobile teeter totter down Liberty Street to the Michigan Theater, to the exact spot where John Roos [proprietor of Roos Roast Coffee] and I had tottered back in the spring of 2008.

I have no idea who these people are. What they're proving is that if you set up a teeter totter in front of a crowded theater, passers-by will just hop on and start teeter tottering. (Photos by the writer.)

The occasion was a ride with Nick Prueher, who together with Joe Pickett co-founded the Found Footage Festival. The festival is a celebration of old, found VHS tapes. It has toured the country for the last six years – each year Prueher and Pickett curate a new show. The 2010 edition passed through Ann Arbor last Thursday.

Imagine an exercise video featuring Angela Lansbury in a bath towel giving herself a massage. Or imagine a sexual harassment training video – how to recognize and avoid it, not how to perpetrate it – featuring a guy in a lunchroom holding up a piece of fruit and asking, “What do you think of my banana?”

These are the sorts of videotapes that Prueher and Pickett have sifted through by the thousands. They culled out the very best to make a part of their show, which they host and comment on live in theaters across the land.

On the totter, Prueher discussed with me the requirement that the videos they collect be “found.” The story of how the tapes were found – in many cases in thrift stores – are as important as what’s on the tape, he said. They’ve been producing the Found Footage Festival for long enough that people now send in videos they’ve found – and the story of how they’re found is archived along with the contents of the tape.

But Prueher described on the totter how there could be a kind of “taint” attached to a collection, if someone just sent in, say for example, a bunch of training videos that they themselves produced and directed back in the early 1990s. He also talked about his internship on Mystery Science Theater.

It was the notion of an authentic “find” that I found most intriguing. So I’d like to tie that into a short reflection about The Chronicle’s Stopped.Watched. section and The Muehlig Funeral Chapel at Fourth and William Street in downtown Ann Arbor. Several days ago, a remarkable addition was made to the roof of The Muehlig Funeral Chapel.  It’s not accidental that I choose “remarkable” to describe this addition. I mean it simply in the sense that it caused someone to remark on it – in the form of an observation filed by a Chronicle Stopped.Watched. correspondent: “[William & Fourth] Crazy contraption on the roof of Muehlig Funeral – art on a stick gone wild. Have I just never noticed it?”

Muehlig Funeral Chapel with the new art installation by Andrew Carson. The view is from the Fourth & William parking structure.

Several readers left comments to the effect that they, too, had noticed it and wondered if they’d just missed it before. Except for the fact that I wanted to write about the rooftop art for this column, I would have been content not to call up Muehlig Funeral Chapel and ask them about it. To me, it’s enough that it’s there, we see it, we add it to our visual memory, we go on about our routine. Until we see something else remarkable, and then someone will remark on the new thing.

But I did call. I spoke with Clayne Frazer, one of Muehlig’s directors, who told me that a general manager, Kevin Jacobi, had conceived it.

He’d purchased the piece from one of his favorite artists, Andrew Carson, who exhibits at the annual Ann Arbor art fairs. The concept, explained Frazer, is eventually to commemorate Carson’s piece as a kind of tribute or memorial to all the folks Muehlig has served over the years.

So why were Chronicle readers offered a snippet about a new piece of art atop Muehlig Funeral Chapel in the first place? It was not because Muehlig sent out a press release. [Please make a note of that, all of you public relations folks, who spend hours crafting words and images to put into an email to convince someone that the thing your client is doing is remarkable enough for someone other than you to remark on it.]

Muehlig simply installed it, along with the lights that illuminate it at night. A Chronicle reader, Matt Hampel, “found” it in the wild, and remarked on it by filing a Stopped.Watched. item. That’s when Stopped.Watched. is at its best, I think. My very favorite Stopped.Watched. items are those that are observations made in the course of someone’s regular routine, and because it is their regular routine, they notice something’s different – something different enough to remark on.

The difference between that kind of Stopped.Watched. observation – unplanned and uncalculated –  and a presentation based on a press release or an official statement, is something like the difference between spotting something in the wild and looking at animals in a zoo.

Apropos of zoos, another recent Stopped.Watched. observation serves to make the same point: “[Fifth & Ann] Amusing new sidewalk ‘petting zoo’ of retired, gilded hydrants, outside fire station [photo].” The new fire hydrants had actually been a part of the Downtown Development Authority board discussion at its Nov. 3 meeting, and I’d included the description of that discussion in my board report. But it inadvertently was cut during a reorganization of the piece. Here’s how it would have read:

Fifth and Division: Fire Hydrants

Besides the underground parking structure construction, the other major project the DDA is working on is the Fifth and Division street improvements. [John] Splitt reported that construction on the project is 85% complete. Leah Gunn said she thought the new fire hydrants in front of the fire station along Fifth Street were “great.” Susan Pollay indicated that they’d been sourced with the help of the new fire chief, Dominick Lanza, and Mike Bergren, a former city employee in the field services unit who works for Park Avenue Consulting, which is helping to manage the Fifth and Division project. Pollay described how the fire hydrants were part of an effort to establish some sense of the firefighters’ commitment to their job. There will also be some pieces of granite installed, one of which will commemorate fallen firefighters. The “plasticky” looking red sign will also be replaced, Pollay said.

That piece of “found footage” serves, I think, to illustrate what we’d lose without Voxphoto’s Stopped.Watched. observation: We’d miss the practically poetic “petting zoo” description of the hydrants. Plus – with all due respect to DDA board member and county commissioner Leah Gunn – some skeptical readers of that passage would have simply concluded she was remarking on the hydrants, because, well, that’s what politicians will do. Maybe because she was looking for the firefighter vote. Or maybe pandering to dog owners in some weird, oblique way. Cynical Chronicle readers, and apparently there are a few, can probably come up more possibilities.

But Voxphoto’s Stopped.Watched. item validates the remarkableness of the fire hydrants. Because as far as I can tell, the guy is not seeking public office – he just enjoys interesting images.

Nick Prueher, co-founder of the Found Footage Festival, rode the teeter totter as it passed through Ann Arbor on Nov. 4.

Not every one of The Chronicle’s Stopped.Watched. items is a perfect gem. But the vast majority reflect the fact that correspondents grasp what that section of our publication is trying to achieve in these very short observations from correspondents’ regular routines. This might be considered fairly surprising, given that The Chronicle did not go to the trouble to shoot a training video on how to be a Stopped.Watched. correspondent.

But there could be a connection between training videos and Stopped.Watched. You know the guy with the banana who starred in that sexual harassment training video that was part of an earlier edition of the Found Footage Festival? I think we might have unintentionally documented his whereabouts here in Ann Arbor – in a Stopped.Watched. item: “[Fletcher & Palmer] Cereal banana killer strikes again. Fletcher parking structure stairwell. A nearly weekly tragedy. Why isn’t this making the news? [photo].”

For the complete interview with Nick Prueher, read Nick’s Teeter Talk.

The crash of the financial markets in the fall of 2008 was the best thing that ever happened to the Teeter Talk interview series. Why? Because the word on everyone’s lips two years ago was … “teeter,” which gave the awkward and vaguely dirty-sounding word some well-deserved airtime. On Oct. 12, 2008, the BBC reported the remarks of Dominique Strauss-Kahn this way [emphasis added]: “The world financial system is teetering on the ‘brink of systemic meltdown,’ the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned in Washington.”

Steve Bean, independent candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor.

Closer to home, a week earlier, on Oct. 3, 2008, a dozen distinguished alumni from the University of Michigan Department of Economics had gathered for a panel discussion focused on the financial crisis. Linda Tesar, department chair and professor of economics, stated that “the financial markets are teetering.” [Chronicle coverage: "Economists Gather, Talk About Markets"]

That same financial crisis still persists, and it’s occupying a lot of Steve Bean’s attention. Bean is an independent candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor – the election takes place on Nov. 2. We talked recently on the totter, a few days after the League of Women Voters mayoral candidate forum. During our talk, he spoke about the need for the city to prepare for various worst case financial scenarios on the national financial scene – dramatic inflation or deflation. The coming decade could be worse than the last one, he believes, and that could be exacerbated by diminished worldwide capacity for oil production.

So if there’s a large theme to his campaign, it’s about the challenge of translating national issues to the local level in a way that best prepares our community for whatever unfolds in the next 10 years. Presumably, the way that Ann Arbor prepares for the next decade might look different from the way other communities prepare. Bean and I touched on that idea in the context of some recent environmental commission deliberations. Bean chairs that city commission.

At their Sept. 23, 2010 meeting, the commission discussed a recommendation to the city council to create a task force to educate the community about peak oil. [Peak oil is the idea that worldwide oil production capacity will soon peak, if it has not already peaked, and then begin to taper off.] The resolution got support from only three commissioners – Bean, Kirk Westphal, and Anya Dale – and did not pass. One of the suggestions during commission deliberations was that commissioners could simply read the reports that other communities had produced about what local strategies would be appropriate – instead of asking the city council to appoint an Ann Arbor task force.

Portland, Oregon, is one such community that has produced such a report. But Portland’s population of more than half a million residents – compared to Ann Arbor’s 114,000 or so – makes Portland a substantially different kind of community from Ann Arbor, doesn’t it? Well, buried in the appendix of a new book – “Our Patchwork Nation” written by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel – is a way of looking at Portland and Ann Arbor that makes the Ann Arbor-Portland comparison … still seem a little crazy, but perhaps a little less so.

The Portland-to-Ann-Arbor comparison is one that has appeared in the pages of The Chronicle before – Republican city council candidate for Ward 5, John Floyd, took up the issue during public commentary at the city council’s Jan. 4, 2010 meeting:

Floyd thanked Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) for clarifying at the council’s Nov. 16, 2009 meeting that Hohnke saw Seattle, Portland and Boulder as models for Ann Arbor to emulate. Floyd then asked Hohnke if he thought that Ann Arbor should change to resemble Seattle and Portland by increasing its population to upwards of half a million people.

Floyd and the Democratic incumbent, Carsten Hohnke, are contesting the Ward 5 seat in the general election on Nov. 2, along with independent candidate Newcombe Clark.

So what do Chinni and Gimpel have to say in “Our Patchwork Nation” about Ann Arbor compared to Portland? Nothing specific, actually – even though the second chapter is devoted to Ann Arbor. But they do have something to say about all 3,141 counties in the United States. [That struck me, on reading it in the book, as a surprising number – for two reasons. First it seems small to me. Off the top of my head, I would have guessed 10,000 or so. Second, 3141 is the same way that π begins. How Chinni and Gimpel resisted the temptation to insert jokes about slicing up the country's "pie" – that's more than I can fathom.]

Chinne and Gimpel have analyzed all 3,141 counties in the U.S. as belonging to one of 12 community types: boom towns, campus and careers, emptying nests, evangelical epicenters, immigration nation, industrial metropolis, military bastions, minority central, monied burbs, Mormon outposts, service worker centers, tractor country. It’s worth noting that by “analyzed” I don’t mean that the authors made up these categories and then went through and just introspected about which category each county belongs to. The categories emerged from a very complex and involved statistical technique with prodigious amounts of data called exploratory factor analysis.

For the purposes of the book, each county is assigned to just the one category where it fits best – that’s the category on which it scores highest in the factor analysis. But that means that every county got some score or other for each of the other 11 categories, too. It turns out that Washtenaw County, where Ann Arbor is located, fits best in the category “campus and careers.” And Portland’s Multnomah County fits best in the category “monied burbs.” But after “campus and careers,” Washtenaw County fits second best into the category “monied burbs.” So from the factor analysis point of view, it might make some sense to talk about the similarity of Ann Arbor and Portland in terms of their monied burbi-ness factor.

Now, if you’re like me, you’ll buy your copy of “Our Patchwork Nation” at Nicola’s Books – that’s where Chinni will be talking about his book later this month – and you’ll open it up to page 25 and read every word on the next 10 pages to see how Chinni answered the question: How did Ann Arbor get to be awesome enough to be included in this book – a book that Ray Suarez, PBS senior correspondent, describes in the forward as “a handbook for understanding your own country.” [Notable local quotables include: mayor John Hieftje; Jesse Bernstein, who's now Ann Arbor Transportation Authority board chair, and at the time he was interviewed, Ann Arbor Area Chamber of Commerce president; Jane Coaston, editor of The Michigan Review; and Paul Dimond, who worked in the Clinton administration and is now senior counsel with the law firm Miller Canfield.]

I believe that if Suarez thinks of “Patchwork” as a handbook for understanding the country, then he means for us to read more than just the chapter about Ann Arbor. Following the 12 chapters that illustrate the community categories come three chapters that tackle general themes, using the heuristic of the patchwork: the economy, politics, and culture. The chapter on the economy concludes with a passage that, I think, sums up the kind of question that Steve Bean is trying to grapple with as a candidate for mayor of Ann Arbor: “Dramatic economic changes of one kind or another are coming, probably sooner than we expect. The question is, What will they be where you live?”

For more details on Bean’s thoughts on local and national issues, read Steve Bean’s Talk.

Devon Persing: Knitter of hats. Creator of blog templates and other web stuff. Leaving Ann Arbor for Seattle.

Seattle has claimed another one of Ann Arbor’s “young professionals.” Departing Ann Arbor, headed west in late July was Brian Kerr. This time it’s Devon Persing who’s leaving Tree Town for The Emerald City – no kidding, apparently some residents of the two cities actually call them that.

Why? Maybe because precious stones are as plentiful in Seattle as Ann Arbor’s leaves are in the autumn – that is, really plentiful. Or maybe it’s because trees are as plentiful in Ann Arbor as precious stones are in Seattle. To figure out which city nickname came first would require some kind of research into historical information – you know, the kind of thing only a librarian or information scientist might be able to pull off.

And what do you know, Kerr and Persing are both graduates of the University of Michigan’s School of Information. But they are, of course, very different people. Most strikingly different – to me, anyway – is that while Kerr favors a headgear-less look, even in freezing weather, Persing will put on a hat, even when it’s not that cold, just to make a favorable impression. [To those who read every word I write, I'm known to be a huge supporter of hats in cold weather.]

On the totter, Persing and I talked about where she got the hat she wore during her ride – she knit it herself. And it emerged during her Talk that knitting for Persing is a mostly solitary activity.

Solitary activity has been analyzed as contributing to a phenomenon that has been labeled “The Seattle Freeze.” It’s not weather related. Rather, it refers to the idea that Seattleites on the whole are superficially nice and polite, but basically won’t ever invite you into their homes.

That prompts the question: Is Persing going to make things even “colder” in Seattle once she moves there – what with all that solitary knitting of hats? Will people in Ann Arbor be on average a little warmer, now that Persing is heading off to Seattle to create web templates for LexBlog? The short answer is:  Of course not. For a longer answer, read Devon Persing’s Talk.

Anticipating that some readers may have discerned a pattern to recent Talks – young talent leaving for Seattle [two is a pattern] – I did ask Persing on the totter to comment on whether Ann Arbor as community is to blame, or perhaps even me personally. Her answer is all there in the Talk, but it’s important to note: Not my fault.

Gareth Morgan is a scientist working on problems of protein folding and stability.

The Dec. 11, 2009 edition of the scientific journal Molecular Cell includes an article called “Optimizing Protein Stability In Vivo.” It’s a paper co-authored by nine people. The first two names on the list of nine authors are Linda Foit and Gareth Morgan. The paper combines expertise in genetics and chemistry, reflected in the specific strengths of Foit and Morgan, who are two young scientists working in James Bardwell’s lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Michigan.

Foit’s name might already be familiar to Ann Arbor Chronicle readers in connection with what might be called a “unsuccessful physics experiment” near downtown Ann Arbor – an attempt to achieve greater residential density with a project called The Moravian. Foit addressed the city council in support of the project.

Morgan’s name is certainly familiar to our readers, but he’s no relation to the publisher of The Chronicle, Mary Morgan. Gareth Morgan was visiting Ann Arbor from England for a two-week span recently and will return to Michigan in October for around a month to continue his collaboration with the Bardwell lab.

The fact that Gareth and Linda’s contribution to the paper was equal is made clear through the last of seven footnotes on the author line:

⁷ These authors contributed equally to this work.

The collaborative nature of modern science was one of the topics that Gareth and I talked about on the teeter totter last Saturday afternoon, just before the University of Michigan football team started its season against the University of Connecticut Huskies.

We also touched on the issue of health and safety culture in U.S. labs compared to British facilities, and the role that game-playing might play in the future of science. For details, read all of Gareth’s Talk. By way of preparation, it might be worth thinking about where it’s easier to drink a cup of coffee – a U.S. lab or a British lab.

I took the occasion of Gareth’s explanation of the credit conventions for a scientific paper as a chance to reflect very briefly on how the allocation of credit is indicated in other lines of work, including journalism.

Distribution of Credit in Teeter Tottering

In my specialty – teeter tottering – the activity is inherently a collaborative effort between at least two people, one on each end. So it’s natural that the world record for teeter-tottering is credited to two people – Brandi Carbee Petz and Natalie Svenvold. They established the initial Guinness World Record for teeter tottering back in 2003, tottering for 75 hours. Yes, Petz and Svenvold would make excellent guests for Teeter Talk.

Responding to an invitation to participate in Teeter Talk, Petz wrote in a 2006 email: “… I have not set a single cheek on a teeter totter since crawling off the one after 75 hours, and now I will avoid tottering again until it is in your backyard.” Petz lives in Washington state, where she coaches track and field at Western Washington University, so a visit to Ann Arbor just to ride the teeter totter seems somewhat unlikely – still, there’s a possibility that serendipitous travel could land Petz onto my backyard teeter totter.

While teeter tottering is, in fact, at least a two-person endeavor, the convention of Teeter Talk as a publication is to list just the riders on the other end of the board from me. It’s just implicit that I was one of the people on the teeter tottering board, so I don’t require an additional credit in that sense.

Distribution of Credit in Movies

I can’t tell from its promotional trailer if a recent movie documenting the assault on Petz and Svenvold’s teeter tottering record was successful. The movie’s title is “A Tale of Two Totters.” The director, Andy Lorimer, wrote to me that he hopes to submit “Two Totters” to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. But that festival focuses on experimental films, and I don’t know if Lorimer’s movie fits that classification. If it’s not accepted by the film festival this next year, I think it’s worth trying to figure out some other way to give that “Two Totters” an Ann Arbor screening.

Movies, of course, have their own way of acknowledging contributions to the monumental effort reflected in the finished frames projected on the screen: opening and closing credits. Few movie-watchers will sit through the endless scroll of closing credits that list out names they do not recognize and describe tasks they do not understand – best boys, grips and the like. What do those people care about having their name listed?

For independent films, those kinds of credits are actually part of the motivation for some people to invest their time and effort in the movie’s production. Those credits document a contribution of effort, time and energy to the project, and that documentation itself can help a person establish a credential for doing that kind of work.

And that way of acknowledging and distributing credit can even partly underpin a general approach to getting projects done. Last summer, Bill Tozier presented as a topic of one of the brown bag discussions at the Workantile Exchange something called “The ‘Independent Film Model’ for Project-Driven Businesses.” From the description introducing that brown bag discussion:

… which is inspired by independent film production companies but intended for projects that are not necessarily films. The business structure is different from most entrepreneurial models, since the goal is not to start a long-lived business or get a job, but to get a project done as an ad hoc group, distribute credit and revenue, and move on past “distribution” as a group of independent collaborators with no long-term affiliation.

I think the absence of a longer-lived business entity that ties collaborators together on a project at least partly accounts for the more explicit acknowledgment of a person’s contribution to those kinds of projects.

For the kinds of projects associated with a business entity, or some other kind of longer-lasting affiliation, many contributions are simply taken as background assumptions that need not be explicitly stated. In a given Teeter Talk, which is by now a relatively long-lived endeavor, the background assumption is that I was one of the riders.

Distribution of Credit in Journalism, Science

Instead of a teeter tottering interview website, let’s consider a news publication – like The Ann Arbor Chronicle – as an example of a longer-lasting, business-type entity under which a vast number of projects are organized and completed. We give them names like articles, stories, columns, or pieces.

Unlike the practice in the scientific community, a news publication will typically acknowledge only a single author – we call them bylines – for a given article. Others who may have contributed in small ways aren’t singled out for credit – or blame. For example, in my guise as a lowly editor, I am not allocated a byline just for changing some of the words so that they convey coherent meaning, or adding relevant factual context the author might not have known about. Nor are editor folk allocated any explicit credit for having had the idea in the first place to devote some resources to following an issue and writing about it.

In that regard, the field of journalism seems to differ slightly from scientific fields. Take the paper that was first-authored by Gareth Morgan and Linda Foit. Listed as the last two authors out of nine are Sheena E. Radford and James C.A. Bardwell. The last position in the author listings designates the principal investigators – footnotes with contact information accompany Radford and Bardwell’s names, but not other authors’. It is Radford and Bardwell’s program of research that Morgan and Foit were executing in that paper, so Radford and Bardwell get author credit for that.

The Chronicle has a kind of “program of research” as well, but we don’t call it that. We’ll typically refer to “editorial direction.” The editor doesn’t get credit for that direction or the actual editorial work on every single occasion an article is published in The Chronicle. For example, when I asked Hayley Byrnes to write a profile of city planning commissioner and environmental commissioner Kirk Westphal, she turned in a piece, I edited it, and it then was published in The Chronicle with Byrnes’ byline – no byline for me.

Even though I conceived of the occasional “Know Your” profile series, and specifically thought it would be a good idea now to include Westphal in it, gave Byrnes the assignment to write the piece, changed many of Byrne’s original words, and added some of my own, my name is not associated specifically with that article. Instead, I’m indicated elsewhere in the publication as its editor.

That’s just the way it’s done. There are several good reasons why the pattern and practice of news publications is to leave editors’ contributions unacknowledged. For one thing, career advancement of editors does not depend on a count of bylined articles in the way that it does for reporters. So editors aren’t necessarily clamoring for their names to be tacked onto the articles they edit.

What possible positive effect would it have to add “Editorial direction and writing consultation provided by [NAME]” to every news article? One effect might be to provide readers with an assurance that someone is actually minding the store – besides the reporters, who we assume are trying the best they can, but might fall short despite their best efforts.

But an assurance to readers that someone is actually minding the store has historically come from the masthead of the publication itself. It’s implicit that any news publication employs someone else besides the reporter – an editor – who looks at everything before it’s published. Readers are supposed to take that on faith.

In the same way, the readers of Molecular Cell take it on faith that there are people who verified the merit of the papers that appear in that scientific journal – peer reviewers. The reviewers of each paper are not listed anywhere in the papers themselves. Readers simply make the fair assumption that each paper was reviewed and properly vetted.

As traditional news organizations try to compete in the mass online marketplace of news and information, one way they could try to differentiate themselves from the work of “mere amateurs” is to give explicit credit to the work of editors with every article. But I’m skeptical that tactic would be an effective way to distinguish a publication’s quality in the online marketplace.

What if there’s no perceptible difference in the quality between material that’s posted unedited online by just some guy – as compared to the articles of journalists who do the work for a living and who’ve had actual editorial assistance? If that difference is not already apparent to a mass market readers, then an extra editor’s byline isn’t going to help those readers understand that its quality is any better.

So for now, The Chronicle will be sticking with the traditional byline – with the implicit understanding that each article is carefully edited before publication.

As for Teeter Talks, I’d like to take the occasion to thank the 179 people who’ve taken a ride over the past five years, dating back to the first talk with Rene Greff on a wintery day in December 2005. Like the paper co-authored by Linda Foit and Gareth Morgan, alums of the totter have contributed equally to the Teeter Talk effort – and they all deserve some explicit credit for that. If a book is ever published, then this is what the title page should look like:

“Teeter Talk,” a story, in reverse chronological order, by Gareth Morgan, Brian Kerr, Metta Lansdale, Scott Rosencrans, Brian Tolle, Caryn Simon, Shawn McDonald, Brenda Bentley, Ariane Carr, Zachary Branigan, Christopher Taylor, Fred Posner, Kay Yourist, John Floyd, Bridget Weise Knyal, Jameson Tamblyn, Neal Kelley, Dawn Lovejoy, Elizabeth Parkinson, Carsten Hohnke, David Lowenschuss, Charity Nebbe, Stewart Nelson, Jennifer Hackett, Patti Smith, Jeremy Keck, Jeremy Nettles, Jeff Gaynor, Paul Cousins, Colleen Zimmerman, Linda Diane Feldt, Gary Salton, Dan Jacobs, Jeremy Lopatin, Julia Lipman, Andrew Sell, Sara S., Dave Lewis, Bruce Fields, Debra Power, Debbie T., Stephen Smith, Kate Bosher, Charlie Partridge, John Roos, Mary Rasmussen, Alpha Omega Newberry IV, Richard Murphy, Rob Goodspeed, Greg Sobran, Brian Ruppert, Steve Edwards, Chicken Keeper, Debra Schanilec, Cindy Overmyer, Matt Naud, Trevor Staples, Michael Paul, Lucy Ament, The Andersons, Barbara Brodsky, Burrill Strong, John Weise, Laura Rubin, David Wahlberg, Edward Vielmetti, Brooklyn Revue, Mark Lincoln Braun (Mr. B), Bryant Stuckey, Doug Selby, Al Sjoerdsma, Kyle Campbell, Amanda Edmonds, Strange Fruit, Chris Buhalis, Richard Wickboldt, Chris Zias, Russ Collins, Peter Beal, Kris Talley, Derek Mehraban, William J. Clinton, Peter Sparling, Will Stewart, Arrah and the Ferns, Patrick Cardiff, Mark Bialek, Royer Held, Matt Callow, Coco Newton, Shannon Brines, Gina Pensiero, Pete J., Liza Wallis, Diane Ratkovich, Peter Thomason, Iden Baghdadchi, Lou Rosenfeld, Bob Droppleman, Charlie Slick, Josh Funk, Nyima Funk, Zach London, Jimmy Raggett, Aimee Smith, Matt Greff, Dale Winling, Tracy Artley, Steve Kunselman, Doug Husak, John Hieftje, Paul Schreiber, Tom Wall, Melinda Uerling, Nancy Shore, Brandon Wiard, Lisa Dugdale, Geoff Eley, Annie Palmer, Dave Sharp, Eileen Spring, Todd Leopold, Matt Erard, Brandon Zwagerman, Matt Lassiter, Sam Vail, Dave DeVarti, Chris Bathgate, Chris Fici, Mark Ouimet, The Boyds, Tom Crawford, Alan Henes, Neil Cleary, Doug Kelbaugh, Scott TenBrink, Barnett Jones, John Roberts, Shelly Smith, Khurum Sheikh, Chris Pawlicki, Jesse Levine, Patrick Elkins, Sam Nadon-Nichols, Dennis Rymarz, Jim Roll, Karl Pohrt, Scott Schnaars, Josie Parker, David Collins, Erica Briggs, Ed Shaffran, T. Casey Brennan, Andy Bichlbaum, Ingrid Sheldon, B.J. Enright, Jeremy Linden, Gaia Kile, Laura (Ypsi-Dixit), Alan Pagliere, Stephen Rapundalo, Alicia Wise, Leigh Greden, Eli Cooper, Joan Lowenstein, Dustin Krcatovich, Adam de Angeli, Todd Plesco, Larry Kestenbaum, Susan Pollay, Chris Easthope, Brandt Coultas, Henry Herskovitz, Rebekah Warren, Tom Bourque, Conan Smith, Dan Izzo, Steve Glauberman, Rene Greff.

Brian Kerr

Nine months have now passed between views of the world from the end of a teeter totter. This most recent view down the board was of Brian Kerr. One way I know Brian is as a downtown pedestrian who strolls hatless down the sidewalk, even in bitterly cold weather, and who must be admonished as you bicycle past: “Put on a hat, it’s cold out here!”

The chosen venue of our teeter totter ride was the middle of the intersection of Main and Liberty streets last Saturday morning, the last day of the Ann Arbor art fairs. We compromised on our chosen venue somewhat by moving to the edge of the intersection, to accommodate concerns of art fair staff.

It was a small concession to make – we’d already dealt with the disappointment of being denied access to the bottom of the pit being dug for the underground parking garage along Fifth Avenue, just to the northeast. Construction sites can’t reasonably be expected to be made accessible to random members of the general public – patrons of the arts, teeter totter riders, wheelchair users, the blind. That makes construction sites somewhat different from websites.

Under the Section 508 amendment of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, federal agencies are required to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. It’s a different piece of legislation from the Americans with Disabilities Act, which just recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. But Section 508 is to websites what the ADA is to buildings – the idea is to make things accessible to disabled people.

Kerr works for a company called Deque, which specializes in helping to make websites work well for hearing- and visually-impaired people.

Here’s a simple example. Visually impaired people sometimes use a screen-reader to get information from a website – it’s a software program that tries to interpret the page using text-to-speech technology. If there’s a picture on a page, say of a guy sitting on teeter totter, then what the screen reader interprets – and what the visually-impaired person hears – is just an indication that there’s an image. If the author of the page supplies some description in the “behind the scenes” coding, the visually-impaired person might hear: “Brian Kerr, who is sitting on the end of a teeter totter. The view is down the board.”

Like librarian Metta Landsdale, Kerr has a professional interest in making information accessible to people. And like Lou Rosenfeld, Kerr is a product of the master’s degree program at the University of Michigan School of Information. And like Brandon Zwagerman, Kerr was one of a group of co-founders of ArborUpdate, a now-defunct local news and discussion website.

But there’s something else that Kerr has in common with Landsdale, Rosenfeld and Zwagerman.When they took their teeter totter rides, they were all leaving Ann Arbor. Landsdale was leaving for Traverse City to take a job directing the public library there. Rosenfeld was leaving for Brooklyn, New York, to start a publishing company. Zwagerman was also leaving for Brooklyn to take a job with an urban planning firm.

Kerr is leaving for Seattle, Washington, to continue to work for Deque – he already works for the company. Deque is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, so the geographic move is not job-related. It’s fair to say that the kind of key-pressing that Kerr will continue to do for Deque allows a certain amount of geographic freedom.

Kerr is somebody I really knew of more than really knew during his time here in Ann Arbor. I kept up with him through the occasional blog post he’d write, a comment he’d leave, or a Tweet he’d send out into the world. That’ll continue, I’m guessing.

What I will miss, though, is seeing him walking downtown and collecting a wave from him as I bicycle past. But there’ll be bicyclists in Seattle for him to wave at, too.

For the complete conversation with Kerr, read his talk.