The Shape of Shaping San Francisco: Celebrating 20 Years!
June 2015
If you build it, they will come…
If you build it, put it in public libraries and community venues around town, make it interactive, refine it, expand it, adapt it to current technologies, publish a book to accompany and legitimize it, include clips from dozens of oral history interviews, reorganize and republish it to make it a wiki, rebrand it (and get underwriting to do so), expand it some more with the help of university students and interns and general history buffs as contributors, and sustain it over 20 years so that it becomes a sprawling online archive that invites contributions from near and far…
We’ve SEEN that you will come!
The current iteration of Foundsf.org logs over 40,000 virtual visits a month, while the overarching project enjoys thousands of face-to-face interactions during year-round public programming, all of which is dedicated to excavating, uncovering, revealing, explaining, and sharing the overlooked, forgotten, flushed, and sometimes suppressed histories that make San Francisco what it is today.
We’ve come a long way from 1995 when we started with butcher paper and an old 286 PC with a 500 MB hard drive! After several years of research, writing, visioning, and other work, in 1998 we released the first edition of “Shaping San Francisco” on CD-ROM and a few public kiosks, accompanied by the publication of Reclaiming San Francisco: History Culture Politics with City Lights Books.