Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland Heights was the hosting location for this afternoon's Meet the Bloggers. Gloria Ferris and George Nemeth, who host MTB,  have invested in recording  microphones and  cassettes which, when deployed in your local coffee shop, create an un-imposing,  yet visually professional, news collecting atmosphere.  

In attendance - besides Gloria, George, Ed and Hunter - were Martha Eakin, Eric Pollock (sp?) Betsey Merkel,  Susan Altschuler, Dennis Coughlin (sp?), and Sudhir Raghupathy, and one or two other persons.   The public walked back and forth through Phoenix as the discussion proceeded.

Beside posting the photo above, I don’t have the time right now to get into the details of the 2 hour discussion.   One thing I learned as an aside is that Henry Ford came up with the idea of his “assembly line” for autos after he visited a hog slaughtering house in Cincinnati (according to Eric -  Ed thought it was a beef slaughterhouse in Chicago).  What is for certain is that the dead animals were hanging on an overhead rolling hook – and that’s what Ford did for his car assembly – slung em up and rolled them along. 

It is refreshing to see two brothers working together – going over to India for a week to consult. 

George had done  background research/reading (prior to today’s interview) on squatters in urban environs – there is the largest squatter's population in Mumbai of any city-   I appreciated George’s outlook on these bottom of the economic ladder citizens.  Ed and Hunter had visited a squatter’s zone of over 400 leather working entrepreneurs.  Rather than bulldozing the squatter’s villages and ousting all the squatters, the Indian economic development model on which Ed and Hunter were consulting has the goal of incorporating these squatter-entrepreneurs into the  internet savvy new business model which Mumbai is seeking.   Cleveland could learn a lesson – think of UCI’s and Cleveland Clinic’s  Disadvantaged Triangle Freeway – there is no plan to leverage any of the existing business in that area –

The coffee grinder and the latte steamer make lots of noise – audio recording is a challenge in an active coffee shop like Phoenix.   MTB is a great civic concept – public interviews which have an adequate degree of  magnitude  to develop a serious atmosphere of investigation and inquiry.  - yet casual enough to encourage comfortable involvement.  Thanks to George and Gloria for advancing the MTB initiative and conducting interesting interviews throughout Cleveland.

I’ll post a few more notes about Ed’s and Hunter’s MTB session as a comment to this post in a few days.  I'm learning it takes a bit of focus to attend meetings and then write accurate and balanced  primary source reports -