The SHAPE of Shaping San Francisco #3 -- Spring 1998

AND NOW WE REALLY BEGIN!

With great pleasure we are delighted to announce that the Grand Roll-out of Shaping San Francisco on January 22, 1998 was a big success. The CD-ROM 1st Edition was demonstrated to an overflow SRO audience at the San Francisco Main Library's Koret Auditorium on January 22. The next night, Modern Times Bookstore hosted an energetic, entertaining, and engaging book launch party for Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture. Both evenings were remarkable for the enthusiasm and energy they generated among the attendees. If you weren't there, sorry you missed it, and if you were, thanks for the support--and the parties!

Shaping San Francisco on the Internet: <www.shapingsf.org>

Our website <www.shapingsf.org> was also launched on January 22, 1998, concurrent with the Grand Roll-out. Thanks to Giovanni Moro, Lisa Brennan, Daphne Blumenthal, and James Barcelona for their hard work at the last minute to provide this piece of our puzzle. Of course, the website will evolve over time. Our "web bureau" is determined to improve and expand it. We already have on our website a message board for your comments, thoughts, and criticisms, as well as a software support page where we can field any inquiries or technical problems you may have encountered. Also, we will soon be offering audio and video clips for downloading, so you can grab some of the clips that wouldn't fit on the CD-ROM.

We will soon be putting up a new opening screen, as well as sections on Gays and Lesbians, African-Americans, Housing, and Transit.

Public Kiosks

As you all know, Shaping San Francisco is not really about a product making it to market, but about launching and defining a new kind of public space, specifically around shared and interrelated social histories. The primary goal has always been to make Shaping San Francisco available in public places, providing free access to the public. Our public kiosk program had its inaugural installation at Modern Times Bookstore during the month of February. Like any computer, there were minor, occasional glitches, but we were happy to see our first kiosk heavily used and appreciated. 

NEW MATERIAL/PUBLIC INPUT

The release of Shaping San Francisco marks the beginning of what we hope is a growing appreciation for grassroots historical research. We plan to continually update the contents of the project, and issue new editions in the future, at least annually. Many people have already contacted us with offers of new material, covering forgotten and transformed areas of the city. Chris Ortiz gave us a short piece about the Portola neighborhood, now bisected by the 101 freeway, once known as 'Little Jerusalem' and 'The Flat.'

Mae Silver has graciously shared her work on the 1894 Midwinter Fair, as well as her original work on Corbett Street, Rancho San Miguel (which once covered the land from Noe Valley to San Francisco State University), and Jose de Jesus Noe, the last Mexican alcalde of Yerba Buena in 1847. She has also provided a wonderful walking tour of Women's History sites in San Francisco.

Eddie Yuen has introduced us to the staggering collection assembled by his father between 1960 and 1990, including over 30,000 hours of audio tape of demonstrations, teach-ins, and news coverage collected everyday over all those years. Photos, slides, and a comprehensive collection of underground and left-wing newspapers and flyers indicate that H.K. Yuen was a multimedia content developer before the technology was ready. His death last October prevented him from considering our "harness" as an appropriate tool for sharing his remarkable collection, but we are beginning to work with his family to make some key excerpts available.

Other folks are considering contributing new work on the local history of religions, and the role of prison labor in building the city, while a large archive of Mission District papers await processing. And this just in the first few weeks since our public release. 

Public Outreach: "A Projector and a Laptop To Go, Please! And Throw in 5 Touch-Screen Kiosks While You're At It!"

Topping our list of immediate hardware needs are a $6,000 multimedia projector (we have found the Epson 5000 handles Shaping San Francisco quite well) and a new laptop with the speed and capacity to handle a kiosk demonstration (about $2,000). This will enable us to schedule a steady stream of public shows in branch libraries,  classrooms, community centers, cafes and bookstores over the coming months and years. The public space we hope to stimulate needs a focused, grassroots public campaign to bring it to life.

Our prototype kiosks proved to be lovely artistically but not so durable or protective as we'd prefer. So we now are trying to acquire several metal box kiosks with touch screens to install in public places. They will cost about $3,000 each, and we'd like to do 4 or 5 at once if we can get the financial support to cover the costs.

CD-ROMs For Sale

Our first print run of the Shaping San Francisco 1st Edition CD-ROM was 2,500 copies. Surprising no one, sales are pretty slow. During the past two years CD-ROMs have been abandoned by distributors and retail outlets, except for the big computer stores. In the stores that do stock CD-ROMs you primarily find games; in any case, all CD-ROMs come in an oversized box printed in full saturated color. It turns out that our modest cellophane wrapper with sticker over a standard jewel box is somehow difficult to shelve and sell by current practices. And as anyone might have guessed, complex non-linear history is not a hot consumer item! Our hoped-for revenue stream from CD sales has not yet topped $500 in the first month, but we do have about $1,800 worth of CDs on consignment or with our distributor.

Several articles accompanied our release, with in-depth articles in the S.F. Chronicle (which was picked up by the Associated Press and reprinted in many papers around the country) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. We have sent out dozens of review copies to various publications, often in conjunction with the book Reclaiming San Francisco, but no reviews have appeared as we go to press with this newsletter, although several are expected soon in the computer press as well as book review sections.

We still hope that CD-ROM sales will rise and provide us with some steady income over the next year, at least enough to cover our office overhead of $600 a month!

EDUCATIONAL APPLICATIONS

We have begun a process to adapt Shaping San Francisco for schools, from primary through secondary and into college. One track involves a possible joining together of Shaping San Francisco with the remarkable work of Now What Software.  They shared an early version with us of their astonishing map-based CD-ROM called "Cool Grey City." Their CD uses U.S. Geological Survey maps to provide the user a speedy ability to zoom in and out of aerial photographs of San Francisco from 1946 and 1993, as well as lining those two series of images up with the 1869 U.S. Coastal Survey map (that we have also used in Shaping San Francisco) and a contemporary street map. Their concept of a "Flashback Atlas" depends on the kind of content we've already developed in Shaping SF, namely curious, provocative bits of history geographically situated throughout the city. Unfortunately, while Now What is a real business with some real products in the market and 50,000 registered users, their analysis of the market is quite the same as ours. Specifically, there is not going to be any investment up front for a locally specific application like this, and the market probably won't even pay for the cost of development. But if the model works, and we can apply it to cities around the country and the world, then the sheer quantity of adaptations may prove the form and establish it as the only player in a new market. That's pipe dream number one.

Our second track is to reconfigure the contents of our 1st edition by working with established curriculum developers to target it for specific classroom levels. This plan would also involve developing associated teachers materials. We are blessed with good contacts in the curriculum development field, with whom we share a good rapport and have a lot of confidence in our ability to pull this off.

A third track is implicit within our software platform, Toolbook II Instructor, namely on-line history for the rapidly growing concept of internet university classes. Our authoring software has evolved away from CD-ROM design and production and towards providing all the tools and widgets for conducting classes over the Internet. With some serious redesigning and anchoring in curriculum design, we should be able to make a version of Shaping San Francisco which is ready to go out over the Internet as part of a university department.

Again, lacking investment up front is our biggest hurdle to overcome. Creating Shaping San Francisco without significant funds and no paid staff was difficult but we did it. Can we continue to move our efforts forward without paid staff? It's hard to imagine, but until some $200,000 appears, we will never have enough money to justify starting a payroll, and giving our stalwart staffers reason to believe that they can dispense with their "day jobs."

PHILANTHROPY VS. ADVERTISING

One of the most common reactions to our plight is to suggest that we approach the large companies that either anchor downtown San Francisco and its "official" history, or the large companies that have grown with the information/internet industries. In these scenarios, we quickly face the problem of remaining independent and non-commercial. After all, even public television and listener-sponsored radio stations have caved in and begun broadcasting advertising. Call us dogmatic and rigid if you will, but having gotten this far, we absolutely refuse to become yet another billboard for corporate America. A good part of our raison d'etre is to re-assert public space and a public domain, not sponsored or controlled by private interests.

On the other hand, we are not romantic or naive about money and harbor no illusions about "clean" money versus "dirty" money. It's all pretty unclean when you dig deep enough. We are willing to accept money from almost anyone and any entity, provided that there are no strings attached, no expectations of prominently displayed logos or what have you. If anyone can arrange donations of money or equipment, our non-profit status ensures that you can take a tax deduction to the extent allowed by law. And we offer you our heartfelt thanks. We list all our donors and contributors of "intellectual property" (ugh! what a self-defeating concept!) with our thanks in our credits screen. That is the extent of what we will do in exchange for philanthropic donations. We are also perfectly willing to plug books and films that have provided us excerpts by having pop-ups of book or video covers with ordering information—as much as a courtesy to the curious user as to the original writer or filmmaker.

YOUR HELP IS REQUESTED

By now, I'm sure you can feel the Big Pitch coming. I won't belabor the point. You have just read a quick summary of our situation. A cool quarter of a million would buy us a year in which 6 of us could survive and dedicate our time to taking Shaping San Francisco to the next level, and also pay for the kiosks and public demonstration hardware that would do so give our vision a chance to become true. Who knows, it might even fulfill our wildest fantasies, and begin to change life!

A friend recently told me about a fundraising scenario in which the question was asked "Have you not given us a large donation just because we haven't asked?" Consider yourself asked! We are asking for hardware: a half dozen state-of-the-art PCs, metal kiosks, and a brand new projector and laptop combination. We are also asking for donations, $250,000 to $25 and any amount in between. I can promise you, any donations you send our way will not be wasted! 

Thanks for your ongoing support and interest. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you have groups you would like us to demonstrate Shaping San Francisco to, or if you have suggestions/contributions of new content, locations for kiosks, or anything else you think may interest us.

Sincerely,

Chris Carlsson

Project Director