We have redesigned every screen (making the text scrolling widgets larger in response to a number of requests) and expanded the contents by almost 15%, now topping 1,200 screens spread over 51 chapters, presenting upwards of 750,000 words and nearly 2,000 photographs. The new version features a completely redesigned interface: the “toolbelt” has been jettisoned in favor of our new animated host “Zeitguy,” who appears as a speaking tour guide in “tour” mode, but also lives on every screen as our primary navigation and search device.

Zeitguy, our new animated host and his evil counterpart, Bill Dollar!

New contents have been added in most areas of the project. A few examples: Tom Fleming, 40-year editor of the African-American newspaper the Sun-Reporter, was interviewed, and from that we’ve added two video clips and three articles; a new piece on the San Francisco Tape Music Center with sound clips provides a history of some of the 1960s origins of experimental music, performance art and multimedia; C.J. Snyder recently came in with an amazing collection of his photographs of the North Beach Beat scene in the late 1950s, which are the basis of our new “Beat Tour” chapter; the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco’s most loved World’s Fair, is now well-represented with beautiful photos and fascinating analyses of the Fair and its architecture. New oral history contributions from lifelong residents of North Beach and Bernal Heights have been incorporated.

We are proud to announce that the 2nd edition includes an unprecedented treatment of our city’s ecological history. The Natural History section has proven to be the most popular part of Shaping San Francisco at our various public installations, so we are especially excited to have added so much new content to this topic. The 2nd edition features remarkable descriptions of the spectacular wildflowers carpeting the southwestern corner of San Francisco at the turn of the century, as well as detailed accounts of the plant life that once filled the swamps that are today’s south of Market neighborhood. Margo Bors has an amazing collection of photos of native plants in the remnant habitats of San Francisco which we’ve combined with Pete Holloran’s unique writings on the city’s ecological history to create what we think is an extraordinary, unique treatment of urban ecology. More recent ecological stories have been added too, including an account of the 1971 Standard Oil spill in the Golden Gate and a summary of the Save the SF Bay movement.

We have added to our labor section an account of the 1978 rank-and-file revolt in Local 2, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers union. The Public Art chapter has deepened with addition of Masha Zakheim’s analysis of Diego Rivera in San Francisco, as well as an excerpt of her analysis of the politics of the Coit Tower murals (to which her father, Bernard Zakheim, was an important contributor). A new screen gives a detailed look at the award-winning Bikeway Mural on Duboce Street, including an interview with the creators. We’ve added some more whimsical pieces, too, including a look at sidewalk etchings and an account of the hilarious Defenestration building at 6th and Howard. And that’s just a bit of what we’ve added.

We’ve also greatly augmented our database (still far from what we’d like it to be, so if any of you are students or have students you’d like to put on to our project to help make the database what it can and should be, we’re ready to take advantage of that energy!), and the new search tool is a big improvement over the first edition, easier to use with many more references, including bibliographic ones. We dumped the “library” from the first edition in favor of a new “bakery” in which baguettes are “eaten” in proportion to how much of a given topic you’ve seen. Throughout Shaping San Francisco we have added hundreds of cross-links, bringing out even further the synergistic and inevitably overlapping threads of our common history.

Free Public Shows and Kiosks

We have conducted nearly three dozen public demonstrations since the last newsletter. These shows combine nicely with our public kiosks, especially for students who first encounter Shaping San Francisco in a classroom situation. After seeing our public demonstration, people generally find it much easier to seek out and make good use of our free public kiosks. And the kiosks themselves have been updated monthly, bringing new content to the public regularly.

We find our machines are steadily in use at all our sites, but especially heavy use has been logged at the Main Library, followed by Modern Times Bookstore, Rainbow Grocery, and our branch library installations. The machine at BuildingREsources and the one at the California Historical Society have been gaining use over time as people learn of their availability and start using them. The most popular area of Shaping San Francisco across all our sites is our Natural History section, indicating the incredible hunger people have to understand the physical and ecological roots of our city life. This bodes well for our 2nd edition, which has a greatly expanded treatment of this area. Otherwise, most kiosk statistics indicate the neighborhood in which the given machine is residing is one of the most popular areas to check out.

Our kiosks have been running since early 1998 at Modern Times Bookstore (888 Valencia), the San Francisco Main Library (6th floor next to the History Room), and City Lights Books (261 Columbus). A permanent kiosk was added at BuildingREsources at Amador and Channel near Islais Creek in the Bayview district last fall. Our network has slowly expanded, and since spring we have had machines running at Rainbow Grocery (Folsom and Division), the California Historical Society (3rd and Mission), and the Gay & Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. We hope to make these locations permanent, but until that becomes possible, we continue to float kiosks to new locations. We’ve had one- and two-month installations at the Presidio Branch Library, Anza Branch Library, Ella Hill Hutch Community Center, and shorter runs at the Exploratorium, the Green & Gold Conference at UC Santa Cruz, and the San Francisco Book Festival.

In October Elo Touchsystems Inc. donated our first touch-screen monitor. We hope to use touchscreens for all our kiosks as the funding becomes available. Our redesign work was carried out in part to facilitate the conversion to touch-screens. Everyone agrees that keyboards and mouses make public kiosks harder to use. Moreover, our machines have occasionally been attacked by hackers and thieves: the Main Library has seen 3 sets of speakers stolen so we’ve given up having sound there for now; the Anza Branch library machine was broken into and completely wrecked by a clever person—fortunately we were prepared and were able to restore it in about 20 minutes. All of these experiences have helped us learn what is involved in our quest to use Shaping San Francisco as the focal point of a new kind public space.

Shaping Europe?!?

As we went to press last issue, we announced an exciting new connection with the former dockworkers of Liverpool. Since then, Executive Director Chris Carlsson was flown to Liverpool by the Initiative Factory, with whom we’ve established a formal partnership. We will provide our software design (“the harness”) and information architecture consulting and technical support to their efforts to produce “Liverpool 2007: A Digital History of Liverpool’s 800th Birthday”. Obviously there’s time to get this project done! The former dockworkers have established the Initiative Factory as an organizational framework through which to pursue a variety of employment-generating projects, utilizing substantial subsidies from the European Commission and the British government to provide decent wages to its 250-odd members as they learn new technologies and embark on this ambitious plan to create a parallel project to Shaping San Francisco.

They have already produced one CD-ROM on the three-year history of the lockout and strike at Merseyside Port (which unfortunately led to defeat for the union workforce there). Several other projects are underway, including extensive training in computers, multimedia and web design. They have a collaborative relationship with Liverpool John Moore’s University and the Workers’ Education Association in Liverpool.

In the wake of this exciting connection we have been pondering the idea of launching a Europe-wide effort for our project. One of our associates moved to Paris earlier this year and began the process of seeking funding to launch a version of “Shaping Paris.” Then in June, a long-time friend from Italy showed up at our San Francisco office, now in the role of CEO of an Italian internet start-up.

With these hopeful relationships already in place, and the extensive network of like-minded activists around the Liverpool dockers, it seems auspicious to explore further the possibility of a “Shaping Europe” initiative, seeding and providing technical support for community history projects in four or five cities in as many countries. The level of cultural support in Europe is far greater than in the U.S., not to mention the extensive “heritage” industry that already provides a good deal of economic support and employment throughout the continent. The conditions for launching “Shaping” projects in Europe seem very positive. If any of our supporters have appropriate contacts, skills, or ideas about this, we hope you’ll get in touch.

Grants, Sales and Marketing

The involvement of Joe Metzler as our Development Director has produced a steady stream of grant proposals. We got the good news in early September from the Gerbode Foundation that we were granted $10,000 for our ongoing efforts. Later the Potrero Nuevo Fund of the Tides Foundation granted us another $1,000. Unfortunately, grant writing and getting is a difficult, mostly unrewarded job. We’ve been rejected—again—by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the San Francisco Art Commission. A major effort was launched to apply for a “Learning Anytime Anywhere Partnership” grant from the U.S. Dept. of Education. Unfortunately, we were not a qualified applicant. Alas. But in the attempt to put together the partnerships we thought would make this grant fly, we made useful contacts with Professor Hal Rothman at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and our longtime board member Peter Linebaugh at the University of Toledo, Ohio, both of whom were optimistic about starting “Shaping” projects in their cities.

We also started discussions with the San Francisco Unified School District’s teacher training department, especially the Social Studies and History curriculum specialists. We hope to further this relationship and, if we can find some funding, bring various teachers into a creative partnership where we customize a version of Shaping San Francisco for use in the school system.

Longer-term we still aspire to spread our model around the Pacific Rim, starting with Oakland and the rest of the Bay Area, spreading out to Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, and ultimately launching efforts in Tokyo, Manila, Sydney Australia, Lima Peru, Santiago Chile, etc.

We are also analyzing the possibility of throwing ourselves into the fray surrounding online education and computer-based learning. Clearly we’ve already created a unique project which could be re-adapted to other curricula, both to deliver other types of content and to teach multimedia design and production. As with most of our best ideas, we lack the capital and resources to launch a concerted effort.

We have learned a lot from the results of our first CD-ROM. First we learned that the retail price was too high at $35, and lowered it to $19.99, which produced a substantial spurt in sales. So as we near completion of our 2nd edition we are coming up with new designs for the box and our marketing efforts with an eye toward two largely untapped markets: the local convention market and the Japanese and European tourist markets. Again, any help from supporters out there with respect to contacts with convention planners or international distributors will be greatly appreciated.

Media Coverage and Recogniton

Our media coverage after the first rollout in January 1998 included the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Wired, Microtimes, New Media, the Associated Press, Film and Tape World and more. Radio interviews on several local stations, and the rapid advance of our book Reclaiming San Francisco to a 2nd printing, all contributed to a great sense of momentum. Shaping San Francisco was a featured title at the Mill Valley Film Festival in October 1998. The San Francisco Historical Society bestowed an Award of Merit on director Chris Carlsson in May 1998, and this past summer the San Francisco Bay Guardian named Chris a “local hero” for his efforts on Shaping San Francisco, as well as other initiatives. Carlsson appeared recently on Alex Bennett’s web TV program, and “Writing on the Edge” on West Marin’s KWMR-FM.

Chris' picture that appeared in the Bay Guardian's "Local Hero" article

The most substantive treatment of Shaping San Francisco’s first edition was a lengthy critique by two academics at the University of Southern California, Phil Ethington and Valentin Stoilov. Their review is sharply critical of Shaping San Francisco, echoing many of our own self-criticisms with respect to its functionality, design, and searchability, but also raising interesting questions about the whole form of multimedia history, CD-ROM as a delivery medium, public kiosks and public access, designed presentations versus a less-edited, less-designed relational database approach. Their review is supposed to be in the 2nd edition of the Journal of MultiMedia History, an online publication from the State Univesity of New York at Albany. You can find it at http://www.suny.edu/jmmh. We will be contributing our own response, too, and both review and answer will probably be posted on our own website soon, http://www.shapingsf.org.

Web update

Giovanni Moro has done a yeoman’s job of creating and maintaining our webiste. It has gradually expanded, with the recent addition of a transit section and not long before that our friend Soledad created a pretty thorough web chapter on SF’s gay history. Most recently Giovanni and Nicole McMorrow have spent several weeks converting our entire labor chapter to HTML, so you can now access a much more thorough treatment of local labor history on our website. Nicole is completing the conversion of the Women’s section next.

We are planning to migrate the whole of Shaping San Francisco to the internet by the 4th quarter of 2000. This will be the third edition, with whatever new material we add during the next year, any design improvements we can make, and so on. Our software platform, Asymetrix’s Multimedia Instructor, is about to ship it’s version 7.0 (we started 3.0 back in 1994!) which, according to beta tester reports, smoothly exports to Dynamic HTML. Now the question we’ll have to face, along with the rest of the online world, is the Internet ready for us?

—October 21, 1999