Our vision is to strengthen democracy and civic engagement by bringing news, community and delight to San Francisco neighborhoods.

digital community kiosks in san francisco

We’re building community kiosks that display local news and community information, and bring joy and beauty to the neighborhood.

Googly eyes optional.

we are focused on public sidewalks in high foot traffic areas, with priority to low-income neighborhoods.

Three innovation tiers:

  1. Product:

    Digital community kiosks don’t exist elsewhere. New York’s 9000 LinkNYC kiosks are metal boxes primarily displaying ads. Other cities signed kiosk contracts with ad companies. Ours is the first and only nonprofit digital kiosk, anchored on community information needs, using ad revenue to reinvest in local community organizations and newsrooms.

  2. Design:

    The heart of our work is Neighborhood Feedback Days. At these public events, we collect resident feedback, evolving content and design of each kiosk. No city has different kiosks in different neighborhoods, crafted by local artists. We are uniquely focused on delivering information and joy to neighborhoods.

  3. Sustainable business model:

    Billion-dollar ad companies dominate city sidewalks, but as a nonprofit, we’re disrupting the model. Our two-sided kiosks, displaying local community information on one side (facing pedestrians) and ads on the other (facing cars), enable us to pass revenue directly to community organizations and local newsrooms who “adopt a kiosk.”

How we started

In summer 2022, Julia walked by one of those old green print news racks in her neighborhood. It was empty and collecting dust. She looked at it and thought, "Wow, this is outdated. Someone should really modernized and digitize it… especially ‘cause so much local news is online." The next week she walked by and the entire news rack was gone! What just happened? Julia couldn't find any information about the sudden disappearance, so she decided to do some digging herself. With no background in journalism, she wrote the first story about the news racks disappearing, which was published in Mission Local.

After researching that story, Julia was even more convinced that having a modern and digital version of the news racks would help people in San Francisco engage with their communities. She organized the first Neighborhood Feedback Day with a cardboard prototype she built in her living room, and then Vanessa helped her with the second one.

Julia is still a news rack nerd. She published another story about San Francisco’s last news rack in January 2025.

How things evolved

The initial idea was about modernizing the print news rack, and the first version of our prototype really focused on local news. We basically printed out a bunch of local news articles and put them on a display board, and took it to public sidewalks to get feedback from different communities in San Francisco.

The feedback was immediately clear: “this is nice, but we want to see more than just local news…” People asked for all sorts of content aside from news articles, and it varied by neighborhood. San Franciscans want to see upcoming events. They want to see local art. They want to see neighborhood pets. They want to see job listings. They want to see community resources. The list goes on. And they want it displayed in a creative, beautiful way— not just a metal box with a screen.

So we started showing a more diverse set of content. And we started partnering with local artists to design the frame. And the feedback came back much more positive. We quickly realized that our work had evolved from just replicating the print news rack toward fundamentally understanding community information needs.

Every time we share our work at a Neighborhood Feedback Day, we evolve our prototype and seek to gather more feedback specific to the neighborhood and community we’re in.

One of our early Neighborhood Feedback Days, in our cardboard era, testing out different types of content in the Bayview.