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Building Benches for the Web (Series)

Building Benches for the Web is a video series for we were online that features creatives, designers, and artists designing and building new Internet gathering spaces. We plan to work with a diverse set of guests who all have some proven interest and support for the kind of Internet that the project is about—human-first, playful, and collectively made.

Guests will bring an idea to a 1-hour session with Spencer where we will work together to implement the idea and deploy it to the web. This will mostly be oriented as augmenting guests’ existing websites with social features that they have been wanting to build rather than building a new, separate place.

This builds on and runs tandem to the

class with the same name⁠

taught at SFPC Summer 2026 and may feature 1-2 students from the class as well.

Show Hook

Building the Internet we wished for.

Making the Internet more alive one website at a time

Making spaces to hang out on the web

Guests

kristoffer tjalve (confirmed)

victoria kirst (confirmed)

jacky zhao (confirmed)

sammie veleer

brian moore

mark beasley

laurel schwulst

robin sloan

alice yuan zhang

nolen royalty

tina tarighian

max bittker

munus shih

olivia tai

omar rizwan

neal agarwal?

Media Output

Screen layout:

show faces of the two guests

screen recording of the guest

Formats

raw minimally edited recording of the session uploaded to Youtube

most editing will be to cut dead time and show the demo if not recorded during the session

short-form clips uploaded to instagram

Run of Show

PRE-SESSION CHECKLIST (15 min)

Tech

Open Riverside, create new session, send guest link

Start OBS screen record (test audio levels)

Check camera framing + DJI mic connected (in-person) or mic check (remote)

Open tldraw in a browser tab, share link with guest

Have guest's website open in another tab

Prep

Know what feature they're building (confirm with guest beforehand)

Do a quick playhtml docs scan so you're not fumbling mid-session

Have a shared doc/notes ready for the "want" conversation

⁠

RUN OF SHOW

1. The Want (~5 min) Guest describes their relationship to the internet, what they want to build and how it connects to their idea / hope for the internet. Makes it clear what they want people to experience there together.

2. The Sketch (~10 min) Us drawing together on some sort of shared whiteboard thing like tldraw -

3. The Build (~35 min) Guest pulls up their coding setup and we work together on the feature. I help bring up documentation and talk through how to build it. They have their site open for testing.

4. The Deploy + First Touch (~10 min) Push live & interact with the feature and reactions

5. The Reflection (~5 min) final reflections / how it feels / get a demo video of inviting friends & other people on to experience it all together

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