 Good afternoon everybody. My name is Tom Fortin. I'm Chief of the Maine Library and I'm Michelle Jeffers I'm the Chief of Community Programs and Partnerships for San Francisco Public Library And we're gonna talk about night of ideas which was a special program after hours program that we held here at the Maine Library and Michelle was the creative genius behind this I just pulled her out of her office so that she could join me because as I was going through my presentation I'm like I'm gonna forget things, but my Michelle actually ran everything. So she's gonna help me Make sure that I don't leave any gaps Tom's gonna do his presentation in French No So first thing is night of ideas it began in 2015 as Night of philosophy and ideas and it's actually a program that's pushed out of Paris To you French embassies and consulates around the world One of the first libraries to respond to this was the Brooklyn Public Library working with Consulate in New York City And it's kind of taken its own life from there But the idea is that on one night The French Embassy Network is connecting all these communities across the world to come together to discuss one broad topic and To encourage community to come together and talk about issues that are important and critical to the day. So Michelle was responsible for getting us going And we're gonna try to run through a bunch of the details things that might interest you in terms of like if you were interested in running a program similar after hours for a bunch of people some things to consider But this is the beginning slide and I think this is hilarious because you know if How many people had heard of night ideas before you saw it on the program today? Wait SFPL people put your hands down Okay, so some of you actually heard about it, okay so You know this I can imagine this looks like oh This was a pretty cool party like getting all these people here until 2 a.m. In the evening on a Friday afternoon Saturday Saturday evening but like to me at the time when we took this photo this was a nightmare because We didn't you know initially we're kind of like all of us when we do programs really worried that no one's gonna show up But you know 6,000 people showed up and this is a security nightmare and I'll go into that in a second And you know and we tried to talk about night of ideas to staff Probably the July and this was in February we presented it we started talking about it with staff in July And I'm not the best person to explain something kind of like this, but You know people didn't really get what you're talking about until we showed them the video and There's a video that was produced by Brooklyn Public Library again Brooklyn Public Library was the other library to adopt this night of philosophy As an after-hours special event and they held it at the Central Library in Brooklyn So this is an event of 12 hours where people can gather things together and meet and with this event We show that philosophy is accessible and that everybody can get access to it. We make it easy for people and cool Nick sets the tone for the 2018 season at the library and beyond All of you gathered here in our lobby are proof that against the odds We will hold tight to knowledge. We will not shy away from complexity And we will do the hard work of listening The notion of community is extremely important You have kumbh in Latin which means with and you have also Munia The Munia is in Latin gift. So community is the sharing of gift Diversity more people of everywhere, but we can see that all the generations For example out there young people and older people It's a genius idea Not surprisingly coming from Paris. It's very European So I'm actually really happy that joining forces with the with the French Embassy We actually make this happen in Brooklyn in this vast building where philosophy ideas and And art is happening all over the building. We have effectively transformed the space of The Brooklyn Public Library into a space of philosophically eager insomniacs Thank you for being awake. I've been an activist for about since I was 16 years old And for me philosophy is the guiding point to make the world a better place Like love will last forever when we first fall in love What do we think about when we think about football? Football is about so many things so many complex contradictory and conflicting things memory history place social class And what I really enjoy right behind you there are people dancing and other people bringing dancing wandering within this space and That's so lively Real great joys of coming to a library is that you're there with everybody And so you're experiencing things together in a way that you can't anywhere else and to me that is probably the most exciting thing about my philosophy I'm really grateful to the evening to the people of Brooklyn and New York City Because they understood what What matters for us to be I mean listen to be understood And that ideas can move the world So after you see that you kind of get it, right? It's like a bunch of programs that you might be doing Normally, um, but stringing them all together At night after you're closed and having a bunch of people show up. So, um When we were first approached Michelle was the first point of contact and maybe just want to talk about that a little second Yeah, and believe it or not. I said yes to this before I saw that video Um, so we had a long-standing partnership We still do have a long-standing partnership with the san francisco museum of modern art and we've done some We did a really cool exhibit here when the museum was closed for renovations as part of the sf-moma on the go and so the Curator of public education there approached me at the the french consulate approached him about doing this event at sf-moma And sf-moma said, uh, I know we can't do this Let's talk to the library and we'll you know, we'll be the go-betweens So they came and we had a meeting and I was naively enough thinking. Oh, we'll just do it in the corrette It'll be easy. It'll be nothing. I hadn't seen this video So, uh, and we ran into our boss Michael Lambert the director of the library that day While they while we were here at a meeting and I said, what do you think if we opened after hours for this Like event with the french consulate and he's like, yeah, sounds good So all of a sudden that was it we were committed to doing it But I'm really glad that we took the risk because it was Definitely worth the effort. It was a lot of effort, but it was definitely a really wonderful evening for us So then michelle brought it to um me and a few other people who work here at the main library And once we saw the video we were on board, you know, again conceptually just listening to it We're like, well, we're you know, we're never open after hours and on a saturday night And how are we going to staff that and you know, so this is the main library And of course we could only hold something like that here at the main in our system But staff who work here, maybe some of you are familiar with the neighborhood The very first thing that I thought of is like, well, okay, february So it's going to be raining And generally as soon as we close the doors on saturday at six o'clock at five fifty five There's people camping in each one of those alcoves and any other alcove on the building You know, so there was a lot to kind of think about and a lot to kind of just work through in conversation that We can address these issues working with our partners in Like outreach to homeless groups Our partners in public works our public SFPD So it all kind of Came together And again our two partners were the consulate in san francisco and they have a really great staff And we worked with their cultural affairs Person and About three or four other core staff and from sf. MoMA again about three or four core staff from SF MoMA and then michelle and some staff here at the main library That support the system in the main library and we had a probably like a hundred thousand meetings And we came up with this concept of um, we didn't want to be each responsible for coming up with a million different ideas for programming So what we did was with all of our partner networks, which they have great networks. Michelle has great networks Um, we started thinking about just assigning different periods of the evening in different spaces To different curating partners and then so these are some of our curating partners. That's not all of them though And then we started building out this spreadsheet So you can see that we used I think it was maybe nine or ten different areas of the main library um By the way at brooklyn public they run theirs from 7 p.m. Until 7 a.m. Sunday morning And on our first try we were not ready to go out all night long But um, we decided to go from seven until two so we could have a little bit of party time in there And starting at seven o'clock we use spaces like the atrium and then you'll see the different spaces as they lay out Um, again, you know when we were thinking of it conceptually We're like well, what if no one shows up and we've gone through all this trouble We we wanted we purposefully limited it to uh, four floors So there's actually seven floors of public service in this building But we limited it to those four floors so that No matter how many people show up, it's going to feel like really engaging really active like the place to be on that Saturday night and And then you can see that we um We we started earlier in the evening with more spaces and then we kind of um had fewer and fewer spaces as the evening went on Um, I do want to say that we reached out to Brooklyn public too because we were like so how did you guys do this? I think they had done it twice at that point Um, but I don't know if anybody works at Brooklyn public forgive me But the people that we spoke with weren't very helpful and then so we kind of winged it on our own without really learning from Someone's else's experience, but um, I think our record shows that we did a pretty good job And of course one of the first things that you think about is well How are you going to staff a saturday night until 2 a.m? Because like all of you saturday is one of your busiest days and you have all your staff working on saturday So and we weren't going to um clothe. We were going to have the building open most of its regular hours, um So then working with michael Lambert who's in the audience back there We got administrative support for giving extra hours or Part you know extra hours to part time people or extending people's day with comp time or very limited overtime But in the end, you know like when we would show the video to staff to get them interested in working that night and helping us out Um, we had like a hundred people volunteer and we wanted to start with the first year as being as liberal as we could Getting as many people interested and active as we could and and and so staff was very interested and we're very grateful for that And then the evening started at seven o'clock With beach blanket babel on With though, um one of the singers singing um san francisco open up your golden gate, right? So and and that was a club crowd, please are of course And then in this room we had At what point was kqed brought on kqed was brought on as one of our partners. Yeah, they were brought on Maybe we had approached them about being like a media sponsor and getting some advertising on kqed And then they were so excited and had a new events producer that they're like we want to be a full partner We want to come in and do a live broadcast So we had michael krasny from forum here on the stage doing two hours of live radio With panel speakers right here And then that was actually archived too and it was played again a couple different times on kqed So it was great exposure for the event But you can see this room was full and it was actually too overflowing Which makes brings up the point So this was uh, you know, uh for the evening we had to do an event bright registration Right, I think a lot of people are doing that now for different times Different types of programs because you need to have a sense of how many people are going to show up And for this as an after hours program, we really only wanted Well, I have to be careful about how I say this we wanted to include people who were engaged And that meant that they went into event bright and signed up and registered Um There is no fire code number for this building like we can't say oh, we have to cap it out a certain number of people It's you know, then it's the limit and we can't let new people in But of course when we did the event bright You know, it wasn't very long before we had over 12,000 people registered to show up that night You know, so suddenly the concern, I know right and then suddenly the concerns about um, well, what if no one shows up? um You know, so then our what if everybody shows up? Yeah, what if everybody shows up and you know So this room as you can see was fully occupied to its limit for the extension of michael crassney's show um, and then uh, you know, so this So we're like, okay, so what kinds of um Performers are we gonna have you know working with a french consulate? Is there gonna be mime? and um These aren't mimes, but they are performers who do um dance to no music But you can see we were incorporating performances into the evening as well So it felt like an event for everybody. Um, and this is just on one of the floors Uh, again, so here you get a sense of the size of the crowd and this is jr Who's a french artist who has an exhibit right now at sf moma? Um, and I think he was probably the most popular speaker He was our biggest draw and we got him committed really early and that helped to get others to commit because He signed up because of the sf moma connection really early Yeah, and I think a lot of the event bright registrations happened when people when people started noticing that he was going to show up This is um, this is hilarious because uh, this shows the security problems The building got so full at one point that you know, uh, it started to feel uncomfortable like It's a safety concern at this point would have god forbid something horrible happened and we had to evacuate the building So we were always aware of that But it's we don't have a lot of experience with doing this. Um, so I love the guy who's straddling the um, what do you call him the stanchion? These people are sitting on the floor Um, this is in the atrium the atrium really when it was full like this It cut off access to other parts of the building and it really created a security concern And you know for staff, we all recognize what it was But I'm not so sure that a lot of the patrons. I think they just enjoyed it They were like there's a it's an event if this is a happening place to be tonight um This one I love this shot because we tried to do a keynote speakers in the atrium And the atrium is not the best space to do that in the end We we learned this because the acoustics are really horrible um, but it works great for visual performance and this guy is actually a friend of um, kathy domero, who's the chief of branches And he did this acrobatic thing where he was like spinning around in this field and it was mesmerizing and it was a It was a real big hit But for us, we learned that the atrium really works best to Like visualize and you know see something but not so much to linger And to hear a presentation And felicia So um the earlier list of all the different types of programs We tried to spread them out across those four floors I was talking about and if you've ever been in the Hermel center This is the Hermel center on the third floor So we had a queer themed series of programs happening in this space and we timed all the programs at 20 minutes um, so We tried to keep it engaging. We tried to keep people, you know, like pithy conversations and not long and drawn out But again this space, I think we set up 50 chairs and there was probably 100 people in there and You know, it was great to have all these people interested But um you start working This is I wanted to show this photo because Michelle and her team did a great job creating maps of the building with all the list of programs And this was critical because you might think that you could do this on an app or you know Other ways of doing this but really handheld paper really served the best Vehicle for looking at that kind of information and of course now we have them as souvenirs I wanted to show this one. This is in the children's room and um Because one of the I wanted this is a reminder to me about the av setups and you know rich is up there in the The booth right now and Kenny's back there We couldn't do av setups in all of the spaces where we were having programs because we don't have enough equipment So we were trying to encourage your presenters to present without av or without power point and really let's keep it low tech Let's keep it focused on the conversation and learning from each other But in some of the spaces we had to give up Yeah, I think if we asked rich, it's probably most of the spaces ended up with the screen of some sort And then this is one of the um Supporters of the program. There was some private money that was available But all the rest of it was unbudgeted and it was just squeezing money wherever we could But in this one, there's a our gallery in san francisco the owners are french they were on board with the french consulate and um They had this uh creating art installation outside and by the way, I haven't mentioned yet that it was pouring rain Again and when we you know, we figured February. It's probably gonna rain, but it poured I mean like I it poured all night long and you know, we had people waiting in line to get into the building. Um, it was It was memorable But this is something here's something that you guys do right like um silent yoga I'm sure lots of libraries have done that program, but have you done it at 12 midnight on a saturday night? So that was fun And then this is a reminder for me and michelle. I think when we're hoping to do this again this year and I I think festive attire is going to be required. Um, this guy had festive attire And I think we could encourage a lot of fun participation with festive attire at this year's version And then this is dominique kren who is french and she is a famous chef in san francisco. I just wanted to highlight her because Planning this event. It was difficult to line up keynote speakers. Um, you can never be um, uh, you can never be early enough on someone's schedule and We you know, we first heard about in july it took us a couple months to figure out that we were going to go forward You know, it's probably october before we actually trying to schedule program presenters and performers And at that time even for feb beginning of february a lot of people just weren't available But um, mrs. Cran was and it was she had a big following as well And then this is michelle who is back here in the audience and I wanted to show this because um And I was the stalwart on this one. I was like we can't offer library services that night It's gonna be too much of a headache. Anyway staff like michelle was very progressive and Michelle was at the children's desk on the second floor and she and her team were making library cards, right? That's a natural kind of outreach for a program like this. So that was wonderful And we left the self checks on so people had managed to find a book While they were like Running around to different programs. They could check it out. So that was really smart on everyone else's part of that mind Yeah, michelle And then I just you know a couple regrets. Um, it's this I spent entirely too much time on this slide But I had to look up is regret in french the same as it is for english. Anyway, um One of the things that we didn't do right was we didn't include enough of our staff earlier on in the planning Um, so that is something that we are trying to correct and bringing more people involved. I mean Michelle and I and Kathy attended like a billion Meetings, but we should have involved more people earlier on um I think we probably also would want a more diverse cast of Program presenters and performers. I think we try but we I don't think we did a very good job So that would be something that we need to change We only had one entrance open and we had staff manage the entrance by the you know Looking at event bright and what have you? Um, we wouldn't do that again. I think it led to too many security concerns. We have three entrances We'd probably use all three entrances. Uh, we did have food and wine in the building Um, so that was a hurdle getting you know, okay for wine and um Any regrets michelle any others that there wasn't more wine I think the other thing is we limited it again purposefully to try to make it feel really engaging by squashing a bunch of People into a small space But if we do it again, we're going to open up the entire building One of the jobs that we have for staff was elevator operator because we were only open on you know Up to the third floor and our elevators. You can't lock them to four five and six So we had to have staff in the elevator um, the other thing is we would Have more time to train people in advance of the night and Um, so overall was a great event But I think despite all those regrets like we had one person who cut their finger like that was the only incident all night So it was actually really pretty smooth despite our fears. Yeah, and um, I don't know if I mentioned this but um A lot of the evening we were looking we have live Uh, a live feed over the internet to our people counter So we could get we could we could gauge how many people were in the building at any one time And it's like um, it's an infrared it counts the number of bodies that have come into the building And you know when we got to three thousand And only on these three or four floors we just we had to cut it off for a moment But then we held people up in the rain. So we felt horrible about that but um In the end it again, it was kind of a miracle that we didn't have any security issues and We had great staff and a great lineup and people really appreciated it Um, I'm just gonna leave you with this which is our video and I'll let you decide whether or not We did as good as brooklyn public The night of ideas is a free day for fun and for During one night. We'll have a hundred teachers and artists Meeting with thousands of people from every background And debate about the future of our world and the topic here in san francisco is the cities of the future Welcome to your bibliotech municipal to san francisco It is so wonderful to see this building packed on a saturday night We have not had this many people in here since we first opened the doors 23 years ago I just want to leave you with one thought um because we're at the future of the libraries Um, I think one of the important lessons that I've learned and this is Just one of the lessons that I've learned and I've learned this from michelle And I think really important thinking about our future is saying yes to partnerships And it's gonna it's gonna pay back all the time, right? Don't be afraid. Just say yes Yeah, so again like we learned a lot. We have a whole new slew of partners You know we reintroduced the main library to a lot of people who hadn't been here Or hadn't been here for a while or people who had security concerns about coming here as you can imagine in our neighborhood So say yes and great things will happen