<aside> 👀

We are currently seeking artists, makers, designers, software engineers, hardware engineers, neighborhood leaders, content strategists, and business development experts to join our all-volunteer team for a few hours a week! Please reach out if you’re interested or know someone we should talk to.

</aside>

Let’s imagine and create together.

AI image to show the concept :)

👋🏼 Hello! Our vision is to strengthen democracy and civic engagement by creating a stronger sense of community, civic engagement, and delight in San Francisco neighborhoods. We do this by building a physical presence for community news and local information on public sidewalks (fuzzy pink googley eyes optional). We are working to design, build, and install digital neighborhood bulletin boards in high foot traffic areas of San Francisco, with priority to low-income neighborhoods.

This project started because Julia Gitis noticed that her local print news rack disappeared without being replaced with a modern alternative, which means San Francisco is losing its last physical presence for local news. Juan Gonzales, founder of bilingual paper El Tecolote and journalism department chair at City College, called the sudden removal of news racks “a tragic loss for the general public.” Meanwhile, Maya Chupkov at Common Cause led a community information needs assessment in San Francisco which demonstrates SF residents feel there isn’t enough coverage they’re aware of about issues they care about, and the coverage that does exist doesn’t satisfy them. This is especially true in the “news deserts” identified within the report, such as Hunters Point, a historically Black neighborhood and “the most isolated neighborhood in San Francisco,” where residents say “it’s urgent that they have information about things that affect their daily lives and their ability to make a living.”

At this stage we want to spark community imagination about what these neighborhood bulletin boards might look like and get more neighborhood participation into content and design. We’ve done a series of Neighborhood Feedback Days with a cardboard prototype and are planning our next series with a digital one.

Do other cities have this?

Not exactly. We haven’t heard of any cities putting local news on public screens— so if you know any, please let us know!

We are familiar with orgs that have done public listening sessions with creative temporary exhibits to engage communities. Some of our favorites: Jesse Hardman created these listening posts in New Orleans— cardboard sculptures shaped like fish and trees! and Commons Archive has the HEAR/HERE community billboard truck driving around North Oakland.

In terms of permanent city infrastructure, New York City has 9000 LinkNYC digital kiosks — you’ve probably walked by them if you recently visited NYC. They’re gray metal boxes with digital screens. Yes they mostly show ads, and yes they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, and yes they’re already expanding to other cities. (You can read more of our thoughts on LinkNYC here). LinkNYC’s dominance in NYC is similar to Clear Channel’s dominance in San Francisco’s public spaces.

The closest kiosk we’ve found to what we have in mind is the Neighborhood Newsfeeds in a town called Brookline just outside Boston. They look like this, with gray-scale e-ink in the middle, and colorful sponsorship outside it (content-wise, they show local updates and events from the town).

LinkNYC

Brookline Neighborhood Newsfeed

Brookline Neighborhood Newsfeed

If you’ve seen other reference points in your town or travels, please let us know.

So, what should digital neighborhood bulletin boards look like in San Francisco?

Playing with AI images, maybe they can be screens showing local news, mounted on wooden structures:

Maybe in addition to local news, they can also feature neighborhood cats and dogs (we’ve heard that request a lot during our Neighborhood Feedback Days):

Maybe they can be pink. And have googley eyes?

Content-wise, imagine the screen is displaying the following types of content (this is based on what we’ve heard from SF residents so far in our Neighborhood Feedback Days):