Smart Valley - a history

Smart Valley was an initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. Smart Valley was a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization focused on creating an "information infrastructure" in Silicon Valley, California - Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, San José, Santa Clara and the surrounding area. Smart Valley drew its ideas and strategies from "an association of local companies working together with the community to coordinate people and technology with projects that enhance the quality of life in Silicon Valley." It was founded in 1993 and its first project was regarding telecommuting. From 1993 through 1995, Dr. Harry J. Saal served as founding CEO and President.

In an October 1995 article in Government Technology magazine that profiled Smart Valley, Seth Fearey, one of the directors of the initiative, and said more than 100 people from area companies, schools and governments, as well as private citizens, volunteered to create the initiative. By the time of this article's publication, Smart Valley operated with a 12-person paid staff, a budget of about $700,000 and donated services and equipment worth approximately $450,000. "The public sector can't sit down and talk to the private sector without the presence of a neutral party. There are too many conflict of interest problems. By having Smart Valley chair meetings, those type of problems go away," said Fearey. "Our mission is to help people understand the information highway, what it's good for and what it's not good for. It's a complicated subject, but one people ought to be looking into and trying to understand. We think there are real benefits not only to the business community and economic development, but also to the citizens and to government, which can use it to build bridges to the citizens."

Smart Valley activities:

Education Projects "vital to preparing our children for the 21st Century and beyond":

SmartSchools NetDay II
SmartSchools PC Day
Technical Guidebook for Schools
Networking Survey of Area Schools
Challenge 2000

Community Projects

Smart Voter, to help people learn about upcoming elections
Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities
Public Access Network (PAN)

Government Projects

Smart Permitting
Smart Citizen

Business Projects

Telecommuting Initiative
Smart Valley Webmasters Group - Smart Web
a monthly series of lectures, Smart Talks, that featured "leaders of the growing information infrastructure"
the annual Smart Valley Corporate Executive Forum "to touch base with the senior executives of our member companies to review the year's progress and to explain our plans for the future."

Affiliated Projects (many originated at Smart Valley and were spun off as independent initiatives):

ABAG, Association of Bay Area Governments
BAMTA, The Broad Alliance for Multimedia Technology and Applications
BADGER, The Bay Area Digital Geographic Resource
CommerceNet, "the premier industry association for Internet Commerce"
Plugged In, one of the first digital divide efforts, working to bring "the tremendous technological resources available in the Silicon Valley to youth in low-income communities" in East Palo Alto (you can see archived versions of this initiative at archive.org by searching pluggedin.org before 2012)
SV-PAL, the Silicon Valley Public Access Link, is a non-profit volunteer organization which brings Internet access to the South Bay community including local schools, organizations, businesses and individuals.

Smart communities initiatives by Helena Lindskog of the University of Linköping, Sweden

From the 1996 Smart Valley web site:

In addition to this World Wide Web server, Smart Valley maintains a host of electronic information services. For those users without access to the Web, Smart Valley publishes our most important documents on our gopher and ftp servers. For the latest news on Smart Valley and all of our projects, our members and the public are encouraged to join our electronic mail listservs. The public can read and post comments and information about Smart Valley and related subjects on the USENET newsgroup ba.smartvalley.

Smart Valley had "a vision to create an electronic community by developing an advanced information infrastructure and the collective ability to use it. We want to facilitate the construction of a pervasive, high speed communications system and information services that will benefit all sectors of the community -- education, healthcare, local government, business and the home. The infrastructure we implement will help transform the way we work, live and learn. The technologies and products we develop to build and take advantage of the infrastructure will be marketable around the world as more and more communities move into the information age."

To see the original Smart Valley web site and read more about these projects, go to archive.org and search for www.svi.org

Note: the Smart Communities Guidebook, How California’s Communities Can Thrive in the Digital Age, developed by California Institute for Smart Communities at San Diego State University and published in 1997, says

a “smart community” is simply that: a community in which government, business, and residents understand the potential of information technology, and make a conscious decision to use that technology to transform life and work in their region in significant and positive ways.

And in How California’s Communities Can Thrive in the Digital Age, Implementation Guide, developed by the same Institute and published in 1997, says:

A “smart community” is a community in which members of local government, business, education, healthcare institutions and the general public understand the potential of information technology, and form successful alliances to work together to use technology to transform their community in significant and positive ways. Because of these unified efforts, the community is able to leverage resources and projects to develop and benefit from telecommunications infrastructure and services much earlier than it otherwise would. Instead of incremental change, a transformation occurs which increases choice, convenience and control for people in the community as they live, work, travel, govern, shop, educate and entertain themselves. Smart communities or regions are also economically competitive in the new global economy, and attract and promote commerce as a result of an advanced telecommunications infrastructure.

Also see

"Smart Valley: an electronic community. A vision of our future," by H.J. Saal, paper presented at COMPCON '94, 28 Feb. - 4 March 1994.

The Public Access Network, a Wired.com article from October 1, 1995.

Release 2.1 by Esther Dyson. Crown Publishing Group, May 5, 1999. 384 pages.

"Smart Valley, Inc.: Creating a 21st Century Community," a presentation by Pete Sinclair President & CEO Emeritus, Smart Valley, Inc., 1999

Civic Revolutionaries: Igniting the Passion for Change in America's Communities by Douglas Henton, John G. Melville, Kimberly A. Walesh. John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 266 pages.