Neighborhood Bulletin Boards
We are experimenting with neighborhood bulletin boards (or "kiosks") that display local news and community information, sourced from student, local and city-wide publications. These digital screens in high foot traffic areas will bring community news to public spaces.
How we started
In summer 2022, Julia walked by one of those old green news racks in her neighborhood. She looked at it and thought, "Wow, this is outdated. It would be cool if it was modernized and digitized." The next week she walked by and it was gone! What just happened?
Julia couldn't find any information about the sudden disappearance, so she decided to do some digging herself. She broke the story about the news racks disappearing, which she published in Mission Local.
After doing the research for 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. And that's how digital neighborhood bulletin boards were born.
The vision
Our vision is strengthening democracy by creating a physical presence for community news and civic engagement. We will install digital screens in high foot traffic areas of San Francisco, with priority to low-income neighborhoods.
The screens will show a variety of content that is hyper-local and relevant, and will draw from student, neighborhood, and city publications. Based on the feedback we're hearing so far in Neighborhood Feedback Days, people want to see these types of content: local news, upcoming local events, community resources, local cats and dogs, art from local student and professional artists, and games.
We are thinking through how interactive the screens will be. In our prototype, we use QR codes for people to read more about what they're seeing. We've also heard the desire for a text-based way to interact with the screen, i.e. sending a text message to answer a question on the screen.
Phases of work
The short version of our proposal is this:
Cardboard prototype → Test and iterate → Digital prototype → Test and iterate → Get city approvals → 6-12 month pilot → Get city approvals → City-wide expansion
Building a prototype
We built our first cardboard prototype from arts and crafts supplies that Julia had at home.
Neighborhood Feedback Days
Neighborhood Feedback Days are the way we "test and iterate" our work. We bring our cardboard prototype to different neighborhoods across San Francisco and we get direct feedback from people who live, work, and go to school there.
We held our inaugural Neighborhood Feedback Day in November 2022 in District 7 (West Portal). In January 2023 we did one in District 4 (at Lincoln High School). We held a Bayview Neighborhood Feedback Day in April 2023 in District 10.
Community partners
Partnerships are key to the success of this project. Community partners co-design the bulletin boards with us, provide feedback on what is most engaging and helpful to their communities, guide what content is displayed, and help us select locations for where to put them. We are always open to connecting with more individuals and organizations in San Francisco who'd like to join this effort.
Should this be similar to LinkNYC?
One city that already has a lot of digital signage on public sidewalks is New York City with its LinkNYC kiosks. We should learn from the lessons learned in the LinkNYC implementation, to implement a better version in San Francisco.
The Link operation is now expanding to other cities including Philadelphia, PA and Newark, NJ. Intersection, the company that owns and operates the LinkNYC kiosks, closed a $150M funding round in 2017 to support its global expansion.
Some of the key similarities between our proposal and LinkNYC:
The LinkNYC kiosks were originally implemented to replace the city's network of 9,000-13,000 payphones on public sidewalks, when the contract expired in 2014. Similarly, our proposal is to replace the city's network of 2000 print news racks on public sidewalks, whose contract with Clear Channel expired in 2022.
NYC gave a contract to Intersection to manage the operation; similarly, we are looking for a city contract to manage the neighborhood bulletin boards.
Some of the key differences between our proposal and LinkNYC:
Product vision:
Digital displays: The LinkNYC kiosks primarily display ads, with some city-wide resources as well. There is an attempt to show more local information through the Link Local program. Our vision is for the displays in SF to predominantly show local news and community information.
Look and feel: We want the SF kiosks to feel friendly, personal, and unique to each SF neighborhood they're in, as opposed to feeling like they're part of a national corporation. We want the hardware to look and feel more like a multi-textured local art project, rather than the same metallic kiosk drilled into thousands of public spaces. Bringing out the joy in San Francisco is one of our key guiding principles.
Functionality: The LinkNYC kiosks offer some functionality in addition to being a digital screen: wifi, 5G cell phone service, and USB charging. We aren't sure we need all of that.
Business model: The core business model of the corporation that operates LinkNYC is to sell global ads. Profits from ad sales primarily go to shareholders, and also cover hardware installation, maintenance and repair, software development, and other operational expenses. We believe we can identify a locally-owned, nonprofit business model that will still cover development, installation, maintenance, repair, and operational expenses, while focusing on partnerships that boost local businesses and keeping profits in San Francisco.
Local control: At the core of our proposal is that San Franciscans should be in control of what is in San Francisco's public spaces. National corporations that aren't based in SF and aren't beholden to anyone in SF will not design a product that meets local community needs in the same way that a locally owned and operated product can.
