Eleanor Beaton: ParkKiosk Volunteer
Our website currently hosts a pilot version of ParkKiosk, a series of pages about specific parks which provide information regarding facility hours, park staff hours, and upcoming events. There are also links to photos of past events and volunteer workdays. To read more about ParkKiosk and see sample pages, click here.
This month we feature Eleanor Beaton, our ParkKiosk Content Manager, as our Volunteer of the Month. Eleanor has been volunteering with NPC for the past year. She learned about our organization through Volunteer Match. For her "day job", she works in film post production, but she has a keen interest in online film and video and new technologies. In her spare time, she often stops and takes photos to add to the ParkKiosk site when she happens by a park!!! Read an interview below about why she thinks ParkKiosk is such an important program for our city.
Eleanor continues to update the ParkKiosk pages and build new ones as time allows. We hope to expand the pages to include all parks in the future. In the meantime, if you have any questions about ParkKiosk, or if you would like to contribute content or participate, please contact Outreach Coordinator Matthew Silva at msilva@sfnpc.org or 415.621.3260.
What inspired you to devote your time to the ParkKiosk pages?
For me, one of SF's distinctions as a city is its wealth of parks small and large - I've had countless "oasis" moments in hidden mini-parks! And NPC does so much to safeguard and raise awareness for our parks, reaching out to the community in many different ways. I was - and am - excited to be part of NPC's innovative online outreach, with the online ParkKiosks, because more and more the fastest resource for information is the internet.
What are your hopes for the ParkKiosk pages? Do you have a long-term vision?
We're still in process of fleshing out and updating the Kiosk pages... and soon I hope the Kiosks will provide all essential information about park programs and activities, quickly accessible to park users. Ultimately the kiosks can be an up to date bulletin board for park and neighborhood events and announcements. So, for example, if you're invited to a picnic at Dolores Park, you can go to the Dolores Park Kiosk and get directions, as well as any other pertinent information about what's going on in the park that day.
I hope the kiosks will be an active online place, with many voices and contributors, where park users share information about their neighborhood. I'd love to see people posting photos, and talking to one another online about specific park concerns and solutions.
