Background & Goals

SF Next is a new initiative designed to gather and develop community-driven solutions to our city’s most challenging problems. To date, the effort has:

Executed, analyzed, and reported on a citywide poll on the city’s largest problems.
Produced the SF Next Podcast, featuring solution-oriented conversations with leaders both within and outside of San Francisco.
Done some engagement with various members of communities in San Francisco.

Moving into 2023, SF Next expects to make significant progress towards this mission. As part of this, the project leads recognize the need to make its engagement processes inclusive, such that the solutions generated reflect the needs, concerns, etc. of the entire city, rather than a privileged few. To that end, this report compiles evidence-backed frameworks, approaches, and case studies on both effective community engagement and consensus-building within communities.

Framing

The ultimate goal of SF Next is to generate (1) bold, actionable ideas that have (2) broad buy-in from a diverse base of stakeholders and high potential to (3) promote better, more equitable social outcomes. To break this down:

Actionability (A) is an important principle throughout this process; ideas should be feasible to implement, such that the city can make progress towards solving the problems of interest.
Broad Buy-in / Consensus (C) is required in order to clearly articulate the will of the people. With strong, diverse consensus on priorities, ideas, etc., leaders in government can more easily put resources behind a project or policy. Of all of the principles, this is perhaps the defining characteristic of this particular initiative.
- That said, consensus is a difficult thing to achieve; especially within the context of everyday communities, people from different backgrounds and lived experiences will naturally have different incentives, values, goals, and other guiding principles to their decision-making logic. This reinforces the need for intentional, evidence-based methods for driving consensus (which will be explored later in this document).
Potential for Impact (I) is closely aligned with the ultimate goal of SF Next; proposed ideas, if implemented, should have some potential to improve lives.
- It is noteworthy that “impact” can happen at many different scales; as such, clearly defining how ideas might be evaluated is a crucial component of this project.
- While the goals should likely be to have the greatest possible impact, we should consider the strategic value of smaller, more actionable proposals, as they could help establish a quick win and boost morale/momentum.

Most approaches to policymaking / solution generation do not align with all three principles. An overview of some approaches is below; despite the fact that they do not all reflect all three principles, they provide a useful history of solution-making projects and organizations from which we can draw inspiration.

Solution-making Approach	A	C	I	Comments
Community innovation labs (e.g., Medialab Prado, etc)	✅	✅		Diverse consensus is generally rare to come across, but is present in some community organizing efforts. They often result in incremental demands that address immediate needs, but rarely have large, systemic impact.
Similarly, community innovation labs (like Medialab Prado in Barcelona) encourage everyday citizens to develop and actually build new things, but usually to a smaller degree of impact.
Academic research (e.g., SPUR)	✅		✅	Policy experts, academics, think tanks, etc frequently propose new policies; however, they rarely follow a community-driven process and might struggle with getting broad support.
Community-visioning processes		✅	✅	Some community visioning processes might come up with ideal futures, either proposed by local organizing bodies or political groups. Without working with policy experts/analysts, these sometimes lack the detail or rigor to qualify as actionable policy or other projects.
Community-driven design (e.g., SF Next)	✅	✅	✅	This project! More below.

Community-Driven Innovation

Design: A Recipe for Solution-Making

As we think about how to steward the creation of radical new solutions to the city’s problems, it is helpful to establish a framework for how these solutions can be readily created.

Developing a shared understanding of the problem