Tag Archives: information super highway

A history of “Smart Valley”

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I recently wrote (and published on my web site) a history of Smart Valley, a 1990s initiative in Silicon Valley, California to create an “information infrastructure” to benefit people, communities, governments & businesses.” Smart Valley was an initiative of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. It 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’s many activities included coordinating SmartSchools NetDay II and PC Day in Silicon Valley, creating an Internet Technical Guidebook for Schools, leading a Smart Voter campaign to help people learn about upcoming elections by leveraging online sources (one of the first of such initiatives), creating and supporting the Public Access Network (PAN), hosting Connect 96: The Global Summit on Building Electronic Communities, promoting telecommuting, hosting a monthly series of lectures, Smart Talks, that featured “leaders of the growing information infrastructure”, and hosting 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.”

Among its affiliated projects, many of which 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.

Why do I care about the history of Smart Valley? Because I was the internal communications manager for Joint Venture in 1995-1996. Smart Valley is one of Joint Venture’s pioneering initiatives that has disappeared from the Internet and is rarely referenced these days, which is a shame, because it was a pioneering effort. I wasn’t involved with Smart Valley, but I really admired what it was doing.

I would have written the Smart Valley history at Wikipedia, but I’m worried it will just get deleted by some guy who decides it isn’t worthy of a Wikipedia entry…

Also see:

  • Early History of Nonprofits & the Internet
    The Internet has always been about people and organizations networking with each other, sharing ideas and comments, and collaborating online. It has always been interactive and dynamic. And there were many nonprofit organizations who “got” it early — earlier than many for-profit companies. So I’ve attempted to set the record straight: I’ve prepared a web page that talks about the early history of nonprofits and the Internet. It focuses on 1995 and previous years. It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed
  • Lessons from NetAid and onlinevolunteering.org
    Some key learnings from directing the UN’s Online Volunteering service from February 2001 to February 2005, including support materials for those using the service to host online volunteers.
  • United Nations Tech4Good / ICT4D Initiatives
    a list of the various United Nations initiatives that have been launched since 2000 to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the “information society,” and to bridge the digital divide. My goal in creating this page is to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
  • Al Gore Campaign Pioneered Virtual Volunteering
    Back in 2000, when Al Gore ran for president, his campaign championed virtual volunteering by recruiting online volunteers to help online with his election efforts. I’ve tried to present some of what his campaign did – this pioneering effort deserves to be remembered, as do some of the lessons from such.

Putting it all on the Cloud

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The media and various consultants are breathless again with another new tech term. What’s gotten them all aflutter? THE CLOUD. Everyone’s talking about THE CLOUD. Everyone’s asking, Are you working in THE CLOUD?!

What’s THE CLOUD?

The Internet. Instead of saying the Internet, we’re now saying The Cloud.

Don’t you dare write me and say, no! no! The cloud is different!

When someone is talking about cloud computing, they are talking about information and software tools residing somewhere out on the Internet, on a server that may be across town or across the country or across the world, rather than on your desktop or a hard drive in your office. When you read and respond to email on a web site rather than your desk top, such as YahooMail or GoogleMail? That’s cloud computing. Also known as the Internet.

It’s not just email: more and more database software for nonprofits is cloud-based software, meaning that some or all of the software is online, and some or all of the information the software tracks – information about donors, volunteers, clients, etc. – reside on a server that isn’t at your office. You access and manage the information by going online.

Wikipedia has a good graphic that illustrates what working on the Cloud looks like.

Cloud computing is terrific – until it’s not. It’s great to read and respond to your email no matter what device you are using and no matter where you are – your laptop at work, your friend’s laptop in Barbados, your smart phone on a city bus – until you find yourself in a place where you have only a window of time for Internet access. Some airports give users just 30 minutes of free Internet access – that’s enough to download my mail to my laptop, but not enough to time to read and respond to it online.

Cloud computing is great for volunteer-tracking and volunteer-scheduling software, if volunteers can log in from anywhere and input their own information. It’s not so great when the Internet goes down and you need that information. And even in the USA, the Internet DOES go down…

Lack of consistent access isn’t the only concern: people and organizations have lost all of the information they have put out on the Cloud. GoogleMail and Flickr have deleted people’s ENTIRE accounts. Imagine losing ALL of your emails. Imagine losing ALL of your photos (with all those notes and tags and descriptions and what not).

Yesterday, I spent two hours editing a document on Google Docs – out on the Cloud. Google Docs supposedly saves your document every few seconds. After all of that work, when I closed the document, it disappeared. I logged in every hour for the rest of the day, hoping it would show up. 24 hours later, I logged back in and, yes, now the document is there – with none of my edits. Two hours of work gone forever. Someone recently made fun of me for always saving my Google Docs offline, and so I had stopped. I’ll be going back to doing that immediately…

And consider this: software vendors go out of business. I was contacted by a small nonprofit a few years ago that was frantic because the company they had used for a few years for all of their event registration was going under, and the company was not only not offering a refund on the nonprofit’s yearly subscription (which had JUST been renewed), but also, was going to take the systems offline before the nonprofit could find a way to transfer their information elsewhere. Their situation was heart-wrenching!

So, should your nonprofit or NGO go with the Cloud? Yes and no…

For your organization’s database that tracks donors, volunteers, clients and other vital information, Cloud-based systems are fine – as long as you have an offline backup of all of the information physically in your office, ready to access in case of emergency. Daily backups would be best, but even just a monthly backup would protect against disaster. When you are purchasing/subscribing to such software, ask the vendor how you will do these offline backups. If they say, “Oh, there’s no need for them!”, look for a new software vendor, especially if you are a mid-size or small nonprofit (such organizations have little recourse in cases of data loss, where as a large nonprofit may have the political clout to pressure a software vendor into spending the resources necessary to retrieve lost information – or to financially-compensate them for the data loss).

For your organization’s email, using the cloud is fine so long it also provides a way for individuals to also download their email when needed, write their responses offline, queue the email to be sent, and then send all the email at once when they get online access again. This is how my email works, and it’s proven essential for being able to work while traveling. For instance, I download my mail just before I get on the plane, I spend the ride reading and responding, and I send all that mail I’ve written (and download more) once I land. It was particularly essential while in Australia, where Internet access is surprisingly bad.

For organizations AND individuals: do online and offline backups of all your computer-based information. I use Mozy to backup my laptop information online once a week (in the middle of the night, while I’m sleeping). The first time you do an online backup, it’s going to take a looooooong time. But subsequent backups should be shorter, because only updated or new information will be backed up. I also have a hard drive that I use for my once-a-month onsite backups. And I sometimes burn my information onto a DVD or two, and give that DVD to a family member for safe keeping.

Don’t forget to back up your cell phone or smart phone.

So, in short: the Cloud is GREAT… until it’s not. Just like having all of your information on your laptop is GREAT… until it’s not.