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by Ken Ikeda, BAVC Executive Director
As I write this, BAVC is in active contract negotiations with the City of San Francisco to operate San Francisco's public access channels. I wish I could share more details about what BAVC hopes to provide through this program, but we are in the midst of unraveling what is a complex web of resources, community expectations and City requirements. Honestly, the learning curve is steep.
As you might know, the annual operations of public access
television have long been funded through a City and County of San
Francisco grant agreement. The source of the grant funding came from
public, education, and government (PEG) funding obligations the City
required and collected from local cable operators under the terms of SF
cable franchise agreements. These agreements have recently changed, and
this has resulted in the City drastically reducing the amount of
funding available for public access. When the funding level was
reduced, Access SF (the current operator) decided that it could no
longer support public access and it did not bid on a new contract.
In early 2009, BAVC responded to an open Request for Proposals (RFP)
process, and last month, the City announced their intention to award a
new public access grant agreement to BAVC.
Why did we respond to the RFP? Why would BAVC want to take on such a challenge? BAVC has been supporting the production and distribution of public
media for the last 33 years. The spirit of public access is closely
aligned with what BAVC believes is the future of public media: content
and mission aligning to not merely inform the community but to engage
them as students, teachers, creators, advocates, and citizens. The
infrastructure and reach of public access provides the opportunity to
bring together community members to identify issues and work together
toward solutions. The blurring between “television” and Internet, and
between producer and consumer, provides a unique opportunity for the
exploration of “transmedia” with a purpose: re-imagining and
articulating the future of public media with our communities leading
its development.
We believe that public access should serve not merely as a public
soapbox, but as a suite of public media services, tools, and
opportunities that strengthen and support the cultural, educational,
and civic fabric of our city. Rather than simply maintaining a public
access facility and broadcast signal, BAVC is ready to develop public
access as the transmedia community center of the future, delivering a
suite of integrated services, platforms, training, and community
engagement opportunities that will offer city residents new ways to
connect with each other and with the many organizations that are here
to serve them.
The significant reduction in operating support for the public access in
San Francisco demands change in how public access is conceived and
maintained. Maintaining the status quo is not an option. And the City
continues to ask us to do more with less. The specific "what" BAVC is
able to do is at the heart of our negotiations with the City and at the
core of the community comments thus far. Our hope is that over time we
can engage in a dialogue and mutual discovery of how public access
services help to define "public" relative to content and access.
Ultimately, BAVC would like to implement a new vision for public
access, one that reflects dramatic changes in technology, workflow,
media access, and non-profit resourcing, emphasizing metrics that drive
a new operating mandate for persistent relevance through services that
the public will truly desire and will utilize.
Change can be difficult, and we understand the concerns of current
public access producers and advocates. BAVC’s desire is to increase and
transform access over time so that public access producers can further
develop their talents, produce more content, reach more viewers, and
have more control over their content. We want to develop a nonprofit
access network throughout the city, making access points geographically
more accessible to more people.
BAVC is committed to gathering as much information as possible from the
community, and working hard to ensure that diverse voices are
represented in the transition. We are engaging Access SF, the City of
San Francisco and our long-term media, technology and non-profit
partners to help us through this process. We are also investigating
national models of successful and innovative public access programs
like Denver’s Open Media Project and Miro Local TV.
BAVC's interest long-term is not in diminishing the power of public
access as a resource to the community. To the contrary, we are
intrigued by the challenge of sustaining and reinventing the value of
public access as a public service. We want to take advantage of free
and open technologies that diversify how content can be accessed and
shared, how the broadcast medium can be leveraged, how the power of the
analog signal can be maximized in terms of how it engages audiences,
and how we can create a public utility that can serve the broadest
swath of San Francisco.
As a first step towards engaging the community of existing public
access producers, BAVC is hosting an open meeting this Wednesday (a
meeting that is already filled to capacity). There will be many other
meetings to come as BAVC is committed to meeting with the community
during every step of the transition process. I encourage you to read
 BAVC's_Vision_for_San_Francisco_Public_Access (1.27 MB) and let us know what you
think.
As BAVC embarks on this new path, we are sure to face a host of
uncertainties, but our commitment to the spirit of public access -- the
valuing of diverse stories that constitute the breadth of perspectives
and experiences that are held within San Francisco – will guide us as
we partner with you, the public, to re-define public access.
Keep up-to-date on our progress or make comments at http://www.bavc.org/publicaccess.
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