to improve the effectiveness of the mailed notices and creating ways that people with understand and if there is legalese on there required by law and how to interpret that for the average person to be able to read and understand. and also thinking about a translation policy and how to improve the number of languages and when we do that, what that looks like whether it's a translation block as main mum on every notified mail that goes out versus -- what does that look like? and developing a translation policy and gets at the equal access language ordinance which is part of what we need to be upholding. public awareness with the department and how to increase the public awareness of the department with what we do and

to get up to speed with what is planning and how to get through and maneuver through the bureaucracy around planning so thereto a lot of that piece as well. and main stream and alternative media gets at how to improve with main stream media and more media buzz in the news and people that watch tv and local news, how to get the department's work and to that level so many people know about what is going on including social media and online ways that people are engaged and reading the local news as well as neighborhood newspapers and those type of media as well and the on the ground outreach to reach people in the communities whether it's booths at community festivals and really getting out

to reach people where they're at. those are both very important. one thing we heard about is while people like the large public meetings, they want the other accretive approaches and do multiples and the focus groups and small groups and presentation at the community meetings and come to where we're at and if you can get creative and can you do theater and involve youth differently than how you involve seniors and family, so thinking about the populations that we are talking to and in order to improve the accountability and the trust and what this means is really articulating and communicating to the public as well as to the

commissioners what exactly the public process is for each project and telling the public how the concerns are being addressed and developed meeting ground rules so there is trust and respect both ways and really and what we heard and why it is feasible and not feasible and how to balance it with constraints and other citywide priority. and just to mention until i didn't do earlier, but so it's consistent and some projects do it and some don't and the process is better overall if it's done overall. and the third one is we heard from the equal access language ordinance as well as from the community that best speak the

languages of san francisco whenever positions are available and especially going to communities and community of color to have that -- to understand the culture and that was important and don't forget about the traditional builting and if you know the key stake holders and have informal brown bags, then once you have a project and turn to the relationships, people will respond and will, if you just send a random announcement, it might be like why do i need to be here? so if we spend time with the support of the managers, people are understanding why we ask

them to participate. and julia will talk about the last few and wrap it up in the next step. >> a big part was the capacity to implement the recommendations and what are the areas to think it through and a number of categories came up and one of the first ones was around communication. and internal communication as well. and within the department on code changes and making sure that all staff are up to date on code ranges and where to get the public up to date and it is a struggle for staff to stay up to date and keep on top of that and get accurate information and up to date information. and also with the communication with the idea of how to go between divisions and with other

agencies and departments in the city and to coordinate and talk with each other and where are the opportunities for coordination and also with that is the idea of communication is how staff and the commission can communicate better and staff can communicate better with what the efforts have been and what they heard from the public meetings and online comment and with what you hear at the hearings and making sure that that is really staff communicating that to the commission. that is an important part as well. the idea of the tool kit and sharings and the next step to come out of the report is the resources and guidelines tool kit that really brings together all the amazing suggestions and

ideas and recommendations that we found and heard around the outreach and engagement strategies to how best engage the public and when and how and what strategies for certain populations and explaining that framework to guide them. and just sharing the experiences around the public and what are the challenges as well as strategies that work and number three is the idea of planning budget anding and how to budget for that and plan for that to get the resources we need to do

what is best and the funding for translation and the online participation toolses and outside facilitators. anded claudia mentioned that staff training is a huge part from staff and at various areas. and starting with facilitation skills and how do you facilitate dialogue with a contentious issue and get the community to come into a safe space where they can talk about issues or, for example, in current planning to act as mediators and a maul remodel or whatever and getting neighbors to be able to talk and

work things through and prevent the d.r. process and that saves a lot of staff time in the end. so building those skills as well. and how to have customer service skills with the public and a lot of great areas we want to put things without the program. two more. evaluation. and that is something we definitely are looking at and what are the different ways to start he value waiting how effect -- evaluating how effective they are and who is accessing the language line and a nong-english speaker and the amount of return mail that is not successfully getting to where they are supposed to be and how do we address that. and meeting evaluations, and potentially at the commission hearings and also at public meeting and asking the public how is this process going for you and how to improve it. and in general, the support of

managers, commissions, and the new communication director who will be taking all this and moving it forward. and it is that general support to really make this process effective and actually implement that and figure out how to best move forward. >> just a to mention the last step and we will be making clear what is already ongoing and some are already being implemented but we wanted one place to address this and we will be working with davenport public institute to develop guidelines and tools for staff to have sem plaits to work on and developing our training for staff and a training program in the schedule. and that concludes our presentation. and we will open it up for

questions or comments. thank you. president olague: thank you, both, for your work on this. we would like to open it up for public comment at this time. >> good afternoon, commissioners. my name is paul wormer and i suspect i may be one of the vocal few rather than the silent many. this is, i think, a very nice analysis of needs and ways to move forward. and i would like, of course, to put in a plug for one of my favorite stalled programs which is the u.p.m. process that had been going and i think that notification component is really important. i want to encourage getting that started. thank you. >> thank you. is there any additional public comment? >> seeing none, public comment is closed. commissioner borden? commissioner borden: this is a

great report and really useful and interesting and public engagement is something i am passionate and excited about and from student government earlier today and how to get more people engaged. and there is pretty much an 8 80/20 rule and 20% of the people and do most of the work 80% of the time. and it is always hard even working at a big technology company like i do at the day job and it is shocking how they don't know information about things when there is an internet portal with every piece of information that you want on it and i recognize you never get to the point of perfection because it is an imperfect practice and i appreciate this endeavor and i like a lot of the things we are doing with our website and i wanted to suggest more tweaks to the website like the inclusion of the way for people to get more information about the project and don't have to email someone on staff but go directly into a database that we could

keep track of. and i think that would be very, very useful to figure out a customer relationship that could be updated on the regular basis. and utilizing social media tools with facebook and twitter and making it for people to take meetings posted on the website and easily put them on their own twitter account to get the word out on their own. and at different times staff has done videos and using you tube as a planning video and the planning commission meetings on there and to get going and the videos go viral and we have things happening in our meetings that could be going viral. and also the issue around other ways of outreach and houses of worship are a great way particularly in communities of color and are the most entrusted

sources and the best that we can do to get paper information to the houses of worship and will make a big difference in knowing about it and will read off notices or announce them to the population. it is a great way to get the information out there. and a lot of the members of the board of supervisors and the communities and they do office office hours and other ways for commissioners and planning staff can pair up with them and be there to answer questions or let people know about projects would be useful. and there is also all these public television and obviously sfgov 1 and 2 and i don't know why we don't have a show and there are shows with people talking about earthquake stuff or whatever and i don't know why we have never thought about maybe doing once a month some sort of show where it's basically hoe to engage with the planning department and how when you get a notice in the mail,

what to do with it. and it would be useful and i am sure we could probably get some air space on sfgov tv about that. and last thing immaterialed to ask you about a couple of things like job shadowing with community youth and i was talking to the executive director of enterprise high school students who expressed interest in working with the planning department on that. and i don't know what you have thought about or how far you are on that process. >> one of the overarching strategies was developing informal and personal relationships and so we have -- we started with a small pilot this summer and in the chinese community and development center had a fellows program to hear it and it was very short. we found out about it at the last minute. we definitely want to increase it and formalize it and have volunteers that talk to students and muse about what we do and demonstrate. so we're starting to think about

it and did a small test and are excited to ep large it. >> and to invite young people who are interested in planning stuff and doing the s.s. build program and the architectural foundation and enterprise high school students and maybe aden again diez -- and to agendize topic and there was a residential project that had huge implications to the school district and that would have been an interesting thing for a lot of the kids to talk about or think about. and they are normally not thinking in context of this project and walking to school but would have been interesting to put before them. and anything to kind of have young people come here and be part of the process because they will learn and also the parents will learn and it is something that spreads the word to get people involved earlier.

and that is interesting and you were talking about social media plans in general and what else that you were all planning on in that social media space. and are we thinking about opening a twitter account? >> one of the things we are already working on is we got through the process a lot of positive comments. still room for tweaks but a you tube, twitter, and facebook account and i think that -- and i can be corrected, but we have some expertise on that and will be helping us kind of figuring out how to manage it and do campaign to use it effectively. we want to make sure how we use it and what we use it for, but it's in the works and slow being planned but will scale up once we have the communications director on board. commissioner borden: if i can help in any way, i am has beenpy

to be involved. and that there is a lot of opportunity to get the word out there to a lot of people and is finding the sources where people are and getting the information to them. >> and there was a clamoring, for sure, throughout the survey. >> thank you. president olague: commissioner antonini? commissioner antonini: thank you for a very excellent report. i think whichever method we use for early notification is very important so people can plan and figure out how to get involved. and i think it's very important to be involved in the main stream media and broadcast and written media as kind of a bellwether of this and it is surprising in my dental practice and fairly sophisticated among the patients that there is a high percentage that don't understand what the planning department is and what the planning commission is.

so that is an educational piece and interesting if i am ever on mainstream tv or in the mainstream media with a quote or a piece, people are always talking about it, but very few will mention something on channel 26 or 27, so not that a lot of people don't watch public acce access. and what people read and if i can go to another city, i always pick up the local newspaper and if there is a planning issue in there, i read about it because it's interesting and you learn about the other cities. and something like an educational article and i am sure maybe some of the media would be interested in this and they are always looking for copy that explains the planning process in the op ed or the sunday supplement without getting into too much detail but what is environmental and what is the approval process and what are the conditional uses and things like that.

and people kind of understood what's really going on. and i think also the outreach is very important because it's been mentioned and is true that there are policy discussions dominated by groups who have a vested interest in the outcome of the discussion and the wider net we can cast and the more people from the general population we can get in probably we're going to get more reasonable solutions to problems than a lot of the things that we're often criticized in san francisco are the result that the policy is driven by small groups rather than by the general population. so i think that's really important and when people realize how the policy changes affect them when they find, oh, i can't buy the rental unit, but you can but you have to go

through a long process and it will cost a lot of money and realize maybe they should have paid more attention to the process earlier. i think you are doing a great job. >> congratulations on explaining what the department does and you also have to say what the department doesn't do. we constantly get items that are d.p.w. or d.p.i. that are m.t.a. and where we have no jurisdiction and the public is confused on the misconceptions. timelines are absolutely important and very few people really understand them including a lot of the people that are in front of the commission. the translation policy and the

public meetings and the departments are all over the map on that. and you go to meetings put out by, again, m.t.a., and the translation policies are all over the map. i don't know if there is any standard in the city. and i have a feeling there should be. but whether you're out in the middle of the richmond with a large russian population or whether you have a large vietnamese population, wherever it is if you are in the public meetings, you do need that type of translation policy. particularly also for written materials. and you are talking about two sides of outreach. you are talking about what i call a bit of scatter shot and which is you tube, facebook, twitter, and you don't direct

that at any individuals and they pick it up because it's out there. the other has been a problem for the city and that there is no such thing as a database. and at one time the public library had a database of organizations and people to contact and the department tries to keep one. and the mayor's office of neighborhood services try to keep one. and the individual superscientists offices and the populations and they all have their own and there's no coordination whatsoever as far as i can determine among them. and it's very hard and when you are talking about getting out to neighborhood organizations and such, sometimes they are as much at fault as anything else and they don't notify anyone of changeses. and so someone who is no longer on a board or no longer the

contact person for the last five years starts throwing away stuff without actually reporting it. very difficult thing to do. i hope you come up with some way of coordination on that. but i think you're absolutely in the right direction on this. public outreach is much, much more difficult to do than anyone can make. president olague: commissioner moore. commissioner moore: i appreciate where this is going and i think it is a bold step forward and i like the level of disclosure and i see the frustration when one of -- i think it was claudia mentioned that it is difficult to reach and involve the population because the numbers are that they have 70% was responding to homeowners and only 21%. however -- 21% were renter.

how far, the stats of the city is 70% renters and only 30% homeowners f i think that big delta gives you an idea that the outreach is not really going as deep into the neighborhood process as we would like it. neighborhood for us is free of ownership and there are no distinctions who speaks to the neighborhood. the interest of neighborhoods are residents and through ownership or renters and they are falling short on finding tech nymphs to deeply -- on finding mechanisms to reach into the real voice of the city. and one thing that comes to mind and i have spent quite a few hours with people talking about phi government from the bottom up is open day a.s.f. and which the database is refined on a

daily basis by large expenditures being spent on consultants to rectify that we are really only in the digital age for a short time and a reasonably old city and trying to understand linking data and hopefully we'll find a way where community meetings and depending on the neighborhood and the supervisor district and go into the app if you are looking for your bus connection and you know within the week this particular meeting on that topic is coming up and you make a decision to put that into your own calendar and become proactive in interacting with the city and rather than only waiting to open the mabox to find you did get a notification. and i am trying to share with a chaining set of resources how to encourage participation. as we are moving as of yesterday

the united states as increasingly more moving towards this as a telephone versus a land line and not advertising a particular phone, but the mobile ability of data that we are starting to share the burden that city government and being a citizen and having a government open the communiques. and linking to what commissioner borden says that technology is more and more available and up to us in a creative and forward moving way to connect the tools and m.t.a. is really good at it and they have some people like the director of communications and i talk with them off and see a big wish list of how that links into planning to make a bunch of things possible. president olague: commissioner sugaya.

commissioner sugaya: i really like what you guys have been doing, but being the cynic that i am, if people aren't engaged in the civic process anyway, we don't even teach civics in school anymore, i don't think, and that is the key problem in trying to get anyone engaged and the only time they get engaged is when it affects them directly and by that time it is too late and we depend on the tra diggal kinds of response mechanisms if you want to call it that. and maybe venture into something i know absolutely nothing about. and that is communication theory or whatever you are studying and all that. but it seems to me that part of it could also be the way the probably process is structured and we are kind of stuck with it. we have a commission and the board is appointed by the board of supervisors and the mayor. and i bet if we changed it and

elected the commissioner, you would have a lot more interest. and we should put that up and also -- >> just using that as an illustration. it is nice to be a body -- i went to a community college board meeting once and they act entirely different and play to the audience and that kind of thing because they are elected. and that is the structural issue and if commissioner miguel is right and to expand the powers and planning for m.t.a. and all those. i am just joking there. and e