Thank you, everybody who contributed. I think we'll call it a robust Happy Dollars week. A lot of good
news floating around. I think we all could use a fair amount of good news. And with that, Jeff McKim
will introduce this week's speaker. Thank you very much. Do you hear me? All right. Dave Askin. So Dave
Askin grew up in Columbus, Indiana.
and has lived in many places, including Bloomington in the late 1980s before returning at the end of
2018. In July of 2019, he launched the B Square Bulletin, a one-man online-only news outlet focused
on local government. Since then, he's kept a particularly close and careful watch on city and county
government, providing detailed, consistent, and fact-driven reporting that many in our club rely on
to understand what's actually happening at City Hall.
Dave brings to bear his journalistic experience running a similar operation with his wife in Ann Arbor,
and after that, working for Daily Newspapers in South Dakota. He's now working to generate enough recurring
revenue to staff the operation with a full newsroom with the goal of allowing the B Square to serve
as a comprehensive local paper for Bloomington, even if it is distributed only in digital form. In addition
to his serious reporting, Dave is also
responsible for the absolute worst Bloomington related puns, which appear in his Sunday funnies, a recurring
dialogue between the fish on the roof of the courthouse and a hawk that occasionally lands on the fish.
You've been warned. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dave for the local paper. Every place is somebody's
backyard. Okay.
Dave, before we get started, you'll just have to ask state advanced slide or next slide as we go through.
Right. All right. Okay. So the slides will show up and replace my face, I hope, right? There will be
a tiny you. Okay. As long as there's a tiny you. Well, while we wait for the slide to show up, I just
want to mention that I did see Council Member Sims
Just before it was declared that there were no more hands, I saw his screen with his hand raised. So
I hope that we can come back to him at some point. I will try to leave enough time for my talk, for
whatever he wanted to say. If not, I will just say that I kept the advice of Council Member
Simms' grandmother in mind when I was preparing this. And that is, if you've ever heard Council Member
Simms' talk,
about his grandmother, you know what the reference is. She said, God gave us two ears and one mouth
for a reason. So I'm hoping to leave twice as much time for comments as I have left to give myself a
chance to talk. So with that, let's get started. Actually, could we go back to the title slide?
All right, so the title of this I'll just read it the local paper every place is somebody's backyard.
That's a kind of a highfalutin title And I want to lower expectations right now The talk is not going
to live up to that title but it does mention backyards and how they fit into local journalism as I conceive
it and especially into the idea of what I call total news I'm gonna end this
talk with a request for some help. That is not about donating money, although that's always welcome,
too. The request that I'm going to make comes in connection with the Be There section of the B-Square
Bulletin website. And that is a very intentional rhyme, Be There or B-Square. I hope that you enjoy
it just as much as I do. OK, next slide. That is the B-Square Bulletin logo. It was designed by Joe
Myers and Kathy Groxson,
Meyers Croxton group and it is beautiful. I wanted you to stare at it for at least a couple of seconds
next slide Here's today's agenda I'm going to briefly contrast the b-square then when it first launched
and the b-square now talk about how my work in journalism literally began in my own backyard and then
I'm going to shift to talk about Bloomington backyards and before
I tell you about how Backyards and the Be There section of the website fit into Total News. I need to
introduce the idea of Total News, so I'll talk a bit about that. But then I'll end up with the Be There
section of the B-Square website. So here we go. Buckle up. Next slide. So the B-Square Bulletin began
as a local news outlet with a singular narrow focus, and that was to give
Bloomington residents an easy on-ramp to understanding the workings of local government. Next slide.
So after shutting down late in 2024 and relaunching early 2025, the mission expanded to include not
just local government, but all aspects of the place that we call Bloomington with a mission of helping
people who live here
get the information they need to help Bloomington's community, not just government, but the whole community
thrive. Next slide. All right. I'm not sure why that slide is there, but we need to go to the next one.
I want to talk about how my work in journalism began. It began during the golden era of blogging, which
ran from something like 2003 to 2010.
The blog that I created was called Teeter Talk. I built a teeter totter in my backyard with my bare
hands, and I invited people over to my backyard to be interviewed while writing the teeter totter.
Next slide. Those are two examples of what blog entries looked like. There was also a whole transcript.
So each entry of the blog was the transcript of the conversation plus a portrait
of the person who was riding the teeter totter with me from my vantage point on my end of the teeter
totter. So the very first person who agreed to do this was Renee Gref. She was the owner of the Ann
Arbor Brewing Company. And at the time she was a board member of something called the Ann Arbor Downtown
Development Authority. It's rough analog here in Bloomington is the Redevelopment Commission. And that
was over 20 years ago. It became
thing that people were willing to do. Even the mayor of Ann Arbor at the time, John Hefja, agreed to
do it. Next slide. Let's see. I have lost my place. That's okay. I made these slides so I know what
they are. So the project
I would say it kind of took off. This slide is filled with thumbnails of, I think, most of the guests
who agreed to be interviewed on the teeter totter. That's a lot of them. I would note that there were
no reportable injuries ever for those interviews. Next slide. I went as far as to install one of those
park signs because they have the teeter totter guys on them. That's outside my house in Ann Arbor. That's
from a recent Google
Street View. So it's still there. It turns out you don't have to prove that you're with the government
in order to buy one of those signs. Next slide. So not everybody wanted to come to my backyard because
when you think about it, that's a little bit creepy to invite somebody over to your backyard yard to
write a teeter totter and be interviewed. So I built a mobile version of the teeter totter and carted
it around on my bicycle
to various locations. And one year, the year was 2008, I entered it in the Fourth of July parade for
the city of Ann Arbor. And the title of that entry was The Totters of the American Revolution. Jeff
McKim warned you. Next slide. Okay. All right. So that was a bit about my
Literal Ann Arbor backyard. Let's talk about my Bloomington backyard next slide Okay now before Well,
I want to say this now don't advance to the next slide until I tell you you've been doing Has been doing
has been doing a fantastic job, but for this one is particularly important So I want to talk about the
red dots for a second. Each red dot is a place in America I have lived and I offer this simply to provide
some credentials for my
perspective on commenting on Bloomington. It's not like Bloomington is the only place I ever lived.
So I've lived in other places and each red dot is one of those places I've lived for a significant period
of time. In the state of Indiana, you see there's Bloomington on the left and then the one on the right,
that's Columbus, Indiana. And I really appreciate Phil Amerson talking or he mentioned the fact that
I share the same hometown as one of the churches where Joe G. Emerson was pastor. He was pastor of my
childhood church. I grew up in the First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Pastor Emerson
was my pastor. And when I bumped into him here in Bloomington, I didn't know he had moved to Bloomington
when I moved to Bloomington. Anyway, I introduced myself and, you know,
I'm not sure if he really remembered my family, but he said he did. But he did say something that I
know is true, because he said it was such passion. He said, you know, the thing I liked about that sanctuary
at First United Methodist in Columbus is that it was a place, it was set up, the physical configuration,
you could actually preach. And he distinguished actually preaching from just having a conversation like
some of these modern young ministers do.
And that squared up exactly with my recollection of Sunday mornings at First United Methodist. He would
preach. Anyway, so don't go to the next slide yet. Bloomington, of all of these red dots, is the place
where I feel most seen, most understood, most welcomed of any of these places. And the next slide will
show you why. So next slide.
So this is the north-south alley that runs between Kirkwood Avenue and 6th Street, runs right by my
building. And one morning I woke up and it was freshly paved. That was great. And also there was fresh
graffiti there on the left of the screen. Dave sucks. And I thought, wow, how did they find out that
I live here? And you notice that it's in a stencil, which means that
It's a message that could be replicated and disseminated really efficiently. That was important to the
graffiti artist. And also, it ensures uniformity of the message. So it never wavered from the same thing.
Dave sucks. It's something that I think everybody knows. And of course, I felt sort of personally targeted
by this graffiti because Dave is not that common a name. So I figured it had to be me. And it's why I love
Bloomington. Next slide. So this is the next series of photographs. These are photographs I took strolling
through my backyard or what I consider to be my backyard in Bloomington on Sunday. It was a snowy day.
Next slide. The snow is still falling. There was city plow out. Next slide. That's 14th Street looking
east. Next slide.
And then, you know, I was out in the snow taking photographs, mostly with my smartphone. And then I
noticed when I reached for my smartphone, it was no longer in the breast pocket of my winter coat. It
has a zipper on it that I was paying extra special close attention to make sure I zipped up every single
time I put it back in, I guess, except for that last time. Long story short, I trudged from 17th Street
back home to 6th Street.
where I fired up my laptop to see if I had actually checked the box on the right thing when I bought
my new phone to see if it had that locator function. And it did. And then Mary Morgan, my lovely wife,
agreed to help me go look for it. And we found ourselves in the middle of College Avenue, right by Miller
Showers Park, trying to listen for the sound of the stupid alarm on the phone. And it was really hard
because there were cars
Crunching past on the snow not a lot of traffic out but those who were out it was enough to to to mask
the sound but we thought we could hear it and You know long story short if we were standing right over
it and I dug through a couple of inches of packed snow And there it was and it still works. It's a snowstorm
miracle but the point of this story is that every story about a backyard has a hero next slide and
The hero of this story is Mary Morgan Mary Morgan is a hero that day and every day and I will fight
anybody who says different next slide All right to understand Let's see, let's make sure I know exactly
where I am To understand how backyards and the be there section of the website fit into the idea of
total news You got to understand what I mean by total news
It's not necessarily the breadth of topic. It's not that every subject is covered. It includes that,
yes, but it's more about future, present, and past. So the B-squares mission is to make Bloomington
a place where it's easy to find out what's going to happen, to find out what just happened, and to find
out what happened a million years ago. So
built some digital tools, some standalone tools, in service of this broader total news network. And
I'm going to tick through some of them right now. So next slide. So one of those tools that serves the
total news mission, specifically future, is a community calendar. It's built purely out of syndicated
feeds. It's in rough shape right now. It's not perfect. It's not pretty. But it is what I use to plan every
working day, and so it does have some functional utility. Next slide. So another digital tool that has
already been built in service of total news is a website called the bloomingtonchronicle.org. It's a
collection of timelines of people and topics. This was an example of the Bloomington Convention Center.
That's what its name is now. Let's remember it used to be the Monroe Convention Center. It's
A collection of timelines with links to original sources proving that the fact claimed in a particular
timeline item is actually true. So you can actually verify that, oh, yes, this actually happened. It's
not just that somebody wrote it down. Next slide. Another digital tool that's already been built in
the service of total news is it kind of bridges the past and the present.
It's a website called bloomdocs.org. It's a public document repository. So if a document matters to
us now, it should be on bloomdocs.org, and it should be easy to find there, and it should be easy to
find forever, so into the future. So in the future, bloomdocs.org will serve the function of the past
documentation. Next slide.
Okay, the present. This is perhaps sort of the most conventional part of what people might think of
as a news outlet. It's a website where news articles are published. So that's what it is. This is the
view of the website. I don't know, it was a week ago, two weeks ago. That's what it looks like. Next slide.
So another tool that I've built in service of the total news mission is the almost daily bulletin newsletter.
That's an email message that arrives in your inbox every Monday and Thursday if you sign up for it.
What's in the newsletter? Let's tick through a couple of the standard sections. Next slide. Generally,
it will start off with a weather forecast straight from the National Weather Service. Next slide.
Let's see, what is that I'm looking at? Well, if I'm having trouble seeing it, maybe you are too, I
apologize for that. There's generally a list of headlines with links to recent articles. So you can
click on the link and read the entire article if you want. If you don't wanna read the entire article
or if you're rushed for time, there's a synopsis of what's in the article included right there. Next slide.
There's also quick notes that are things that maybe don't need a full article, or maybe there's just
not time to write a full article yet, but something that is useful to log in publication somewhere.
This one is an example. It's a note about the Monroe County budget order, which is of interest to, I
don't know, probably three people in the county, one of which is Jeff McKim.
One of them is me, and I don't know who the third person might be. But still important to record for
the record. Next slide. There is generally an on-the-calendar section. What's coming up, where I plan
to be, if you're wondering what I'm planning to cover, generally it's reflected in the on-the-calendar
section of the almost daily bulletin. Next slide.
The Almost Daily Bulletin includes always a featured animal at the Bloomington City Animal Shelter.
This is Cornbread. He's a very, very good boy. They're all very, very good boys and girls. You should
consider adopting one of them if you're looking for a way to add an animal to your household. Next slide.
And finally, let's see. The last item in the Almost Daily Bulletin is
generally a photo. It runs under the banner of photo finish. And the images in the photo finish section
of the Almost Daily Bulletin come from the Be There section of the website. So what is the Be There
section of the website? Next slide. If you go to the section, right, so that shows you how to get there.
So if you click on Be There in the top navigation menu, next slide.
You'll see basically a stack of photos with the captions out to the side. Next slide. Individually,
here's what they look like. The headlines are all names of intersections or places that if you feed
it into a geocoding piece of software, it will be able to give you that launch with the idea that in
the future, these things could be laid out on a map if you wanted. I'm not doing that right now. I'm
just trying to make the work easier in the future.
by making the headlines the place. This is a picture of a burned out shed behind the Bunger and Robertson,
or the former Bunger and Robertson property at 4th and College. Next slide. This is just a photograph
of an upcoming concert. Is that headline news? Well, no. Still, it serves an equally valid purpose,
same as the very fancy syndicated feeds community calendar.
You want to put information in front of people's faces where they're walking around in their own backyards.
And this was a poster for Vic Luna's. I can't even read that. I think he should choose a different font.
Latin Jazz Big Band, I think is what it says at the back door. Next slide. This is also good for celebrity
sightings. So Smith Road and Third Street.
That's the office lounge. This is a photograph. If you notice, I went and got all fancy and colorized
him. Hank Ruff is sitting there at the table, and so he's in color. The rest of the people are in black
and white. I don't know if you know Hank Ruff. He's the son of Andy Ruff, city council member. And there's
also, there's another gentleman sitting at the table who's enjoyed some success in the music industry as well.
slide. This one was on Kirkwood Avenue and Grant Street. These are a bunch of college students taking
shelf selfies with each other. I was told that the guy in the middle of the tall one is really good
at football. I'm not sure if that's true. But anyway, next slide. This one was taken the day after Perry
Township trustee Dan Combs died. The B Square published an article
about his death. And then after that, this scene unfolded outside the trustee's offices. That's something
that should be recorded somewhere in our community's notebook. That's a memorial to Dan Combs that someone
made. Next slide. And then this went up after the national championship game victory. Caveat MTOR apparently
has championship gear.
That's different than what that storefront normally looks like, and it's not headline news, and the
function of the local paper is not necessarily to provide free advertising for businesses, but to me,
that's significant that that happened. It should be recorded somewhere, and so I did. Next slide. So,
you know, most of these photos that I just showed you are from my own travels through my own Bloomington
backyard, but I want the geographic coverage
of this section, the Be There section to expand. And I also want to lighten my own workload. So my request
to you is this, as you move through your own Bloomington backyard, notice what's new, what's changed,
what might not necessarily need to be headline news, but should be just written down, recorded somewhere
in the record of our community, what Bloomington, Indiana was like on this day or during these days,
send an email to Dave at bsquaredbulletin.com with an attachment of an image. It doesn't even have to
include an image. Most of them do, but it can just simply be a text description of what's going on,
what you see, not your opinion about what you see, just a description
description of this is what I'm seeing. You can also send a text to that number there. That's my cell
phone number 734-645-2633. And you can file be their items. I will load them up to the website and take
care of everything like that. Next slide. If you want to sign up for the Almost Daily Bulletin newsletter,
you can use that QR code. I am really hopeful that works. I believe it does. I've tested it.
You know, in technology, sometimes the technology ends up getting buried under two inches of snow.
That is it, I think. Next slide. Questions. I'm ready for questions. I have a question. Yes. Tim Jesson,
can you hear me? I can hear you. Good. It's a wonderful program and a wonderful way to
open a discussion on what's something that's slacking in our community right now. I used to write thanks
to Bob Salzburg, a member of this club for the Herald Times. And then a few years ago, they said they
didn't want any local news. I think I may have written an article or two for you. It was on the religions
section. And right now we got plenty of questions
and stories about the religion section, like the quarterback, Hernando, is a regular participant and
communicant at the St. Paul's Methodist, not Methodist, St. Paul's Roman Catholic Church. And then the
church is putting on this wonderful services for the homeless. But how can we get a better, your effort
is wonderful, outstanding. I'm glad to know about it.
but how can we get a better communication device that reaches to all the people instead of just a few
hearing this and few hearing that. And we really need what you're doing and much more to illuminate
what's going on in our town and our state and our nation as well. Thank you for the presentation. Okay.
So, I mean, the question I heard in that was how can we
make news and information available to everybody. I think certainly a big part of the B Square's mission
is to make sure that all the information is always and forever free and accessible to everyone. So there's
not a paywall of any kind. People who contribute money to the B Square don't get any more
News and information than anybody else. So basically people who contribute are Making it possible for
those who don't contribute to have access to the information So that includes the email newsletter almost
daily bulletin. There's no cost to Subscribing to that. I mean when you when you do sign up for it,
it'll give you the option of contributing But if you don't want to contribute you just choose the free
option and you're good to go but I think that the
I mean, simply making the information available for free and putting the information in as many places
as possible so that people can stumble across it. Like, for example, the B Square Bulletin has a Facebook
page. Every article that gets published gets automatically a link published to the Facebook page, not
because I'm a fan of Facebook, just because
A lot of people use Facebook to get their news and information. And so I want to throw the B-squares
news and information into that pile so that people might stumble across it. I think the harder nut to
crack and what your question really is asking is how do we make it so that more people in a community
are relying on the same news source so that they have a uniform
Experience with their news and information. So the local paper in the past I think it was a touchstone
for people that That wove this or weaved It tied it tied the the community together because people had
that common experience. There was that article. Did you see the op-ed? The Herald Times I think it used
to like most local papers that used to serve that function and I think that increasingly the Herald Times has
stopped serving that particular function where, well, if you say, did you see the piece in the Times,
you could rely on most people saying, yes, I did. Or I saw that it was there. I haven't read it yet.
But nowadays, I'm not so sure that's true. So the answer to your question, I don't know. That's the
short answer. OK, next up, we have Judy Schroeder.
Hi there, Dave. Thank you so much for what you are doing for this community. It is just an incredible
effort. Are there more than one of you? There is just one of me. There are what I've added since relaunching,
since I actually publicly stated this is the goal and the mission to become the local paper, to cover
everything that needs to be covered
in Bloomington, everything that the local paper would cover. I've added some freelancers. Most notably,
I have a freelancer covering K through 12 material. There's an article published this morning. Kelton
O'Donnell is his name. And it's useful. Well, you don't have to add that, oh, by the way, he's a senior
in high school. But, you know,
I treat him just like any other freelancer. And I don't think he would notice that he is a senior in
high school, except maybe if you looked at his, there's the photograph that runs by the byline,
you might say, wow, he looks really young. But you wouldn't know it from reporting he's doing. He started
working as a freelancer, it was late spring, early summer, kind of, I mean, you might call it an intern,
but I would just call it more like, I don't know,
of an apprentice. And then there's a handful of freelance photographers. There were two freelance
photographers that covered Bloomington North and Bloomington South football. South was Dave Quick and
North was Amy Mason. So their photographs of those games were nice compliments to the game write-ups
that a fellow named Sean McEvoy did.
Met Sean through the media school. They basically put that connection together and I think he was enrolled
for credit In fact, I know for a fact he was enrolled for credit for one credit as their internship
But he got paid just like all the other freelancers did so, you know the high school football coverage
was for this fall and now I
to some extent, the basketball coverage, is an attempt to demonstrate that the B-square really is not
just thinking about covering things besides local government, but will actually do that. And we will
do it at a really high standard. I mean, I would put Sean McEvoy's game write-ups as, I would say, the
gold standard for what high school sports write-up should be like. I want to also, we Rotarians owe
you a special thanks
for your coverage of Amir's, I want to say, capture by the FBI and by ICE. That was the most informative,
thorough account that I've seen anywhere. How, in heaven's name, what is your business model? How do
you do this? Well, if I could go back to that article about ICE, it was, and because I am terrible with names,
It was Liz Vital. Well, yes, Liz was actually a key piece of the puzzle. And actually, let me use this
as a vignette to illustrate why it's important to literally be there. So it was after a county council
meeting. I went up and I talked to, it was Councilor Kate Wilts and Liz Vital. And I was talking to
Kate Wilts, and at that time,
She had passed along a tip and basically the initial sort of, I don't know, investigation is way too
strong a word. My initial inquiries, you know, Bloomington police, MCCSC said, no, we have no information
about anybody on, you know, school grounds. We know nothing. And basically I just wanted to report to
counselor Wilts that I had done some due diligence and that I had not come up with anything.
Well, Liz Fiddle was standing right there and she said, oh, but that's not a big nothing burger here.
Let me give you a contact to, and I'm not coming up with his name. Dave Meyers. Yes, Dave Meyers.
That was it. Thank you. Let me give you the name of a guy who can confirm all of this. And so she passed
along that contact.
If I had not been at the meeting in person, if I had not gone up to talk to Kate Wilts, if Liz Feidl
had not been standing right there, I mean, this is what a community is made of. And if you just go to,
I mean, it's not that much effort to show up to the meeting in person so that people see that you're
there. If they wanna talk to you, they can. I mean, Liz Feidl, she could have kept her mouth shut. She
didn't have to say anything, but she did.
and she gave me something I could act on, and that's why that story could be reported. Liz Vital served
this vital connection to Dave Myers, and that's how it got reported. I'm sorry, you actually had a question
that I- Business model. Business model. There's two things. One is donations from individuals,
And the other thing is donations, but from larger corporations. The donations from individuals that's
been in place since the very beginning, that's an ongoing effort to try to inspire, one, more people
to read and then more people to recognize that there's a value that they're getting out of it and that
they can contribute something to it. And then more recently, you know,
Advertising has always been, for the news industry, foundational for survival. And it's not advertising.
What we're selling, it's sponsorships. And the folks who've put together the program, they understand
clearly the difference between advertising and simply a sponsorship. Sponsorship is like, here's the logo.
We wanna be affiliated with this operation. We want people to know that we're supporting this operation,
but it's not like if it's a law firm, hey, if you've been injured, you should call us. Whether there's
this call for action, no, it's just the name of the law firm. So I'm hoping that the corporate sponsorship
program will be the thing that puts the B Square Bulletin on kind of an institutional foundation
where, eventually, I would like to turn this thing into a nonprofit that has a board and has, then,
a life beyond me getting tired and deciding that I just can't do it anymore. So that's in the future.
To be clear, it is not a nonprofit yet. My initial thought on relaunch was, OK,
We need to form a nonprofit as soon as possible. And that proved not to be workable just because forming
a nonprofit is a huge amount of work that I think is vastly underappreciated. So I decided to focus
instead on let's get revenue to a level where we can get some more people involved, where somebody can
actually be paid to do the work of putting the nonprofit together and handling all the stuff that I
absolutely hate to deal with. Like for example,
I spent five hours. I mean, somebody who knows what they're doing would not have taken five hours, but
I took five hours to put together the IRS forms that freelancers have to be issued at the end of a year.
And I hated every second of it. So I'm going to jump in. We're almost at time. We have two hands up.
We have Jeff Richardson and Joy Harder with their hands up. And then we have Jim
Sims for Happy Dollars. So with one minute left, Jeff, kick it off. I'm going to let Joy ask questions
since I spoke earlier, and my question is going to be more involved than a minute answer. Joy, go ahead.
That's very kind, Jeff, mine is more of a reach out to you Dave number one to say thank you for what
you do for the community. I'd love to have a cup of coffee with you. I am the relatively newer president
of limestone post.
magazine and hearing you speak and knowing that there's many, many missions that we share and seeing
opportunities for collaboration going forward. If we were in the room together, I would have pinned
you down, but I'm getting you online. Somehow, I'll put my information in the chat and you can get it.
Thank you for what you do. Thank you. Go ahead. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yeah, I'll be as quickly
as possible.
I would like to offer $20 because I'm happy. This has to do with my sister's closet. On Martin Luther
King's birthday celebration day of service, she asked me to speak to her volunteers during their day
of service there. I tried to highlight how the roadmap of my life has led to where we are today. I'm
an Eagle Scout. I'm a member of Phi Beta Sigma Second Baptist Church and our own Rotary Club.
And each and every one of those has a component of service in their mission. So I was very happy. I
hope I touched some of those volunteers on what it means to serve and then personalize your service.
And in honor of that, I'd like to offer $20 to the Teacher's Warehouse. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Thanks,
Dave. All right. Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Dave. Thank you, everybody, for joining us on this
Sort of impromptu digital only making this thing work Dave. Thank you so much for that presentation
I know we've we've crossed paths a few times in the past and I think a lot of us in this club have And
uh, it's kind of hard to see the point Sometimes in this world we occupy but uh, I think dramatically
more often than not we can we can trust The b-square to to get the point right the first time. So thank
you for talking to us today. Thank you for what you're doing Uh in honor of your talk today a donation
will be made this quarter to amethyst house
I'd also like to thank some of our volunteers today. Tyler Martin Nichols for making a lot of the machinery
of this work on the fly. Literally could not do it without you. Leslie Kusnow for sort of managing the
flow of folks in and out and questions and information. Our speaker introduction today from Jeff McKim,
our reflection from Phil Amerson, a reporter for this meeting, Kyla Cox Deckard.
I don't think we have a lot of pictures being taken today, but I'd still like to thank Alon for helping
us sort of navigate the documentation stuff prior to the meeting. Our next regular meeting will be on
February 3rd in the Georgian Room in the IMU, and Dr. Brad Fulton from the O'Neill School will speak
to us about observing civic engagement. So sort of a continuation of today's conversation. And last
but not least, we have the four-way plus one test.
don't necessarily have to come off mute, but you can if you'd like. So first, is it the truth? Second,
is it fair to all concerned? Fourth, will it build goodwill and friendships? Fourth, will it be beneficial
to all concerned? And of course, as always, is it fun? All right. Once again, imagine you have heard
a bell. That concludes this week's celebration of service. And again, thank you so much, everybody,
for joining us. And hopefully, we'll see you all in person next week.