City of Sheboygan: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup?

Every pictures tells a story

Editorial: City worker portion of survey very revealing.   (Sheboygan Press, 11/5/2011)

Excerpt:   But they do have issues with how the city is run, including a feeling that the Common Council was trying to micro-manage individual departments.

The employees in the focus group wanted foremost to see that department supervisors were given the ability to oversee day-to-day functions without interference from the Common Council.

They were also concerned that the turnover in supervisory positions along with several unfilled positions — human resources, most notably — contributed to city government inefficiencies.

We couldn't agree more.

The Common Council, mostly out of an attempt to save money, has allowed several key supervisory positions to remain vacant. Human resources, city planning and city assessor are three of the top-level positions that haven't been filled with permanent hiring.

The University of Chicago's Joe and Rika Mansueto Library and How It Works

The Bibliotech: Library of the Future, Now. (The New York Times, 11/6/2011)

Excerpt: But while many academic libraries are digitizing and moving holdings off site, Manseuto is the largest and latest (of about two dozen libraries) to add automated storage and retrieval systems. Volumes are housed in solid steel cases about 50 feet below ground. Should someone want to actually touch the real thing, books are delivered through a labyrinthine system of cranes and elevators. Picture the door-sorting machine from Pixar’s “Monsters Inc.”

With Room to Read, John Wood Expands Andrew Carnegie's Vision into the 21st Century

His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives, by Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof.   (The New York Times, 11/6/2011)

Excerpt: I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.

LINK to 2010 annual report

According to the Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Report, Room to Grow meets all but 2 of their more than 20 standards for Charity Accountability.