The SHAPE of Shaping San Francisco #4 --
Winter 1998-99

Welcome to the 4th edition of the Shape of SHAPING San Francisco. With the release of version 1.0 this past January a lot of people have asked what our “next” project is... Well, Shaping San Francisco is far from finished! By any account, we’ve only just begun... As you probably know, version 1.0 was released on CD-ROM (for Windows), public kiosks, and in a very limited version on the web at <www.shapingsf.org>. Simultaneously City Lights Books published our companion volume Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture (ed. by James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters, San Francisco: 1998). We always conceived of this project as being ongoing, something that by its very nature could never really be “done,” and we still avidly seek new contributions and contributors. There are so many subjects barely touched on, if at all, let alone all the improvements and embellishments that can be made on what we’ve published so far. We don’t see Shaping San Francisco as an end in itself, but more as means to help stimulate new types of social interaction around our shared histories.

Our passion is for our public kiosks which are basically desktop computers running the full content of our efforts and dedicated exclusively to Shaping San Francisco. The kiosks are free and have been extensively used by the public. One has been up and running since February at Modern Times Bookstore. The Main Library has had one for six months on the 6th floor near the History Room. City Lights bookstore has had a kiosk for about two months now. San Francisco’s largest worker-run grocery cooperative, Rainbow Gro-cery on Folsom Street at 13th, is considering hosting a kiosk in early 1999. Kiosks at Modern Times and City Lights are expected to re-main open freely to the public indefinitely.

We just received good news: that the Main Library has extended our kiosk as an exhibit through March 1999. We hope to begin discussions toward a permanent installation in the Main Library, as well as making Shaping San Francisco available to all the branches over their forthcoming dedicated network.

Shorter runs of public kiosk installations were held at Southern Exposure Gallery (May 25-June 20, 1998), the Exploratorium (Sept. 13-23, 1998), and the Green & Gold Conference on the Environmental Legacy of the Gold Rush at UC Santa Cruz (July 30-August 2, 1998).

We have captured usage logs that give us an idea of what people are looking at, for how long, and what the scope of a typical session is. The most popular area in Shaping San Francisco is our Natural History of San Francisco section. In fact, interpreting our statistics led to some heated exchanges among our inner circle. Of the people who try Shaping San Francisco, those who have taken a “tour” average longer than 20 minutes per session and visit at least 15 screens. Twice as many people don’t choose a tour in Shaping San Francisco; their sessions tend to last half as long and cover only half as many screens as the tour-takers. In any given week, each machine is used by somewhere between 50 and 100 users, perhaps averaging about 7 or 8 a day. There have been a half dozen sessions lasting over four hours covering more than 120 screens each!

We are now analyzing what works and what doesn’t about our current kiosk system. A more cinematic approach to the tours is one of our goals—not to replace anything we currently offer, but to make it available to those who prefer a more linear approach. Touch-screens, printers, fewer bugs, more reliable operations in general, all loom large as worthy goals for our next version.

Shaping San Francisco continues to integrate new content. We have dozens of photos and other resources in our pipeline to digitally “author,” and place into Shaping San Francisco. We update our public kiosks at least monthly, adding dozens of new pages to various neighborhoods and chapters (e.g. Art, Ecology, Women, Ingleside, Noe Valley, Golden Gate Park, Castro, Birth of the City, etc.), and are completing some updated videos and new interviews. We’ve revamped the database screens since the CD-ROM, and have drastically improved the contents and usability of the search/database functions. Data entry has always been given short shrift by our volunteer staff, but during the past few months Joe Caffentzis has taken it upon himself to give us a respectable database. We’d still like to have it further fleshed out, and look forward to new volunteer energy interested in working on improving our database and search capabilities even further. We are also looking at clearer ways of displaying the answers to searches.

Overall design issues are getting a new look. We are planning to redesign the toolbelt into a smaller tool cluster with a new look and feel. We’d like to take less space on the screen with the tools. This is one of several areas that we are seeking your opinion about. Please take a moment to fill out our questionnaire on the back page and mail it in. We value your comments and criticism as we make improvements on our project.

Upcoming Public Demonstrations

Shaping San Francisco is committed to a public presence. Our kiosks offer an ongoing free space to the public, but we also carry on a series of public demonstrations/lectures, generally free to the public. Upcoming appearances are scheduled for

Nov. 7-8, all day San Francisco Book Fair

Nov. 12, 12:30 p.m SPUR (312 Sutter)

Nov. 18, 7 p.m. Glen Park Branch Library

Nov. 21, 2 p.m. Potrero Hill Branch Library

Dec. 2, 7 p.m. Presidio Branch Library

Dec. 9, 7 p.m. Bernal Heights Branch Library

Dec. 15, 7 p.m. North Beach Branch Library

Dec. 16, 7:30 p.m. Modern Times Bookstore

Jan. 9, 1999, 3 p.m. Park Branch Library

Jan. 23, 2 p.m. Ingleside Branch Library

Feb. 26, 9 a.m. California Council for the Social Studies, Sunnyvale, CA

Public Appearances

The past six months have seen several dozen public demonstrations in classes (San Francisco State, City College, Mills College, UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley) bookstores (Printers Inc. Bookstore in Palo Alto, Cody’s Books in Berkeley, Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco) and for various organizations, including the Golden Gate Nurses Foundation, the San Francisco Historical Society (at which project director Chris Carlsson was honored with an Award of Merit), San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, Japan-U.S. Community Education and Exchange, the Presidio Visitors Center, the Exploratorium, the Bay Area Video Coalition and more. We’ve also had a respectable number of radio interviews and articles in the local and national press, from the SF Chronicle, Microtimes, and the SF Bay Guardian, to Wired and the L.A. Times.

Shaping San Francisco was a featured title in the New Media/VideoFest within the Mill Valley Film Festival, held during the first part of October, with a special seminar/demonstration conducted on Sunday October 5, 1998.

We have managed to establish a small network of retail outlets, although sales of the CD-ROM version have been predictably disappointing, just clearing 400 or so. We need to get rid of another 1,400 at least (we’ve probably given away at least 400 by now). To encourage this we are announcing a price cut to $19.99 (from the $35 we’ve been asking) for the 1st edition CD-ROM Shaping San Francisco as of November 7, 1998. Buy copies for all your friends for holiday gifts!

On a happier note, we have seen booming sales of our companion book Reclaiming San Francisco, which went into its 2nd printing within three months of its initial publication, justly rewarding City Lights for their risk.

Moving to the Web?

Converting our efforts to work on the web raises many questions. What kinds of new designs can we use to best capture the aesthetic we’ve already established on CD-ROM without causing terrible waits for downloads on the web? Beyond the design question, what are the limitations of trying to make Shaping San Francisco more of a web-based urban history “space?” What kind of database functionality do we lose? Can our existing programming be moved over or do we need to reprogram everything? If we are going to change platform and do any major redesign and/or reprogramming, we would need to have the funding to make this our regular job. The 10,000 hours we spent in the past years without wages cannot realistically be reproduced. But we can do (and have done) quite a lot as volunteers, and have no plans to throw in the towel. For now, it appears our efforts must focus on improving what we’ve got as opposed to a wholesale rebuilding of Shaping San Francisco as a web site or recreating it on any other authoring software platform.

Meanwhile, Giovanni Moro <giovanni@blazt.com> has done a great job of giving us a presence on the internet. The site at <www.shapingsf.org>, while a mere shadow of our contents elsewhere, has been steadily growing during its first months. We are committed to regular additions and new releases, and hope to make more use of our website as a place of discussion and debate, as well as a place from which updates and clips can be downloaded.

Shaping San Francisco Bicycle and Walking Tours Coming in 1999

We will be hosting six custom tours in 1999, to be held from noon to 5 on the 2nd Saturday of January (the 16th), and the 3rd Saturdays of March, May, July, September, and November. These tours, limited to 30 people each, will include both theatrical and multimedia performance. They will also include two or three stops in cafes or bars where excerpts from Shaping San Francisco will be projected, linking the multimedia project to the adjacent neighborhood. We are conducting them as a benefit for Shaping San Francisco ($50-25 sliding scale).

The January tour will be on bicycle, and will reprise the Ecological Bike Tour given in October 1996 by project director Chris Carlsson. Do you wonder where the creeks ran in San Francisco before they were all paved over? Did you know that one of North America’s largest continuous sand dunes ran from the beach to the Bay in pre-urban San Francisco? Or that the house that Captain Adams built near the water’s edge in the 1850s now lies a long way from the water? Reconnect to the place you live while taking a lazy bike ride around some of the city’s natural and un-natural wonders.

This tour will be co-hosted by Bill Kersnowski and Joe Caffentzis with surprise appearances from other characters TBA.

Shaping Liverpool?

As we were preparing this newsletter, we had a surprise visit from Mike Carden of the Liverpool Dockers, who recently lost a bitter 2.5 year strike in England. Mike told us that ongoing efforts of the community in Liverpool to create new employment opportunities for the sacked dockworkers has led them to creating their own multimedia history project, first of their strike, and secondly Liverpool cityitself. Much to our surprise and delight, they acquired a copy of Shaping San Francisco which has been an inspiration and model for them! This has reinvigorated our enthusiasm for our project and its potential to reach people well beyond our own area. We are thrilled that our model of a grassroots, participatory history project has been embraced by a vibrant working-class community still fighting for its life.

In February 1999, Shaping San Francisco Director Chris Carlsson travelled to Liverpool at the behest of the Initiative Factory, the dockworkers' effort to bootstrap themselves into the New Economy. Ten days in Liverpool led to some lasting friendships and useful technical and philosophical exchanges.