The first argument of this paper is that Cyborganic drew on Silicon Valley's culture of entrepreneurial sociality to join place, technology and community in new productive relationships that yielded new businesses, commercially successful software products, and technical innovation. Here place refers both to the local concentration of residences and companies in particular neighborhoods in San Francisco's Mission/SOMA (South of Market Street) area and to their regional location commuting distance from Silicon Valley, Marin County and the East Bay. Community refers to dense social networks of multiple, overlapping connections from kith and kin, to colleagues, business partners and neighbors. In order to show Cyborganic's productive capacities, the paper will trace the creation of an Internet services firm (Organic Online) and two commercially successful software products (Apache, Vignette Story Server) through the history of Cyborganic. Most case studies of Silicon Valley draw on data from the 1970s and 1980s or earlier, and focus on the Valley itself (i.e. on Santa Clara country proper). The Cyborganic research, in contrast, took place in the 1990s and centers on a particular neighborhood in San Francisco. It examines the role of this group in the rise of SOMA as a local hub of global Internet culture (Castells 1996:56), or, as Wired magazine dubbed the area in 1993, "ground zero of the digital revolution." In this sense, the Cyborganic case extends the study of Silicon Valley's distinct culture of entrepreneurial sociality in place and time, and shows both continuity and significant change in its evolution in SOMA in the 1990s. During these years this area of San Francisco emerged as "a new Silicon Valley" where small, emerging businesses grew and outposts of larger enterprises were established in proximity to "foster dynamically evolving networks of relationships, 'a kind of fishnet organization'." (IFTF, 1997b). The pattern of regional development was consistent with research showing that "the large metropolis tends to be a dominant innovative milieu" and that new "technopoles" are often spawned near established regions in a process of "short-distance decentralization." (Castells and Hall: 235).
The paper's second argument moves beyond an assessment of Cyborganic's productive character in terms of firms, products, and market values, to examine the role of place and community in creating and sustaining cultures of innovation. Cyborganic was a self-conscious project to build a hybrid community both online via the Internet and offline via face-to-face interaction in a shared, physical place. It was both a community and a business and it is not always possible to delineate where one leaves off and the other begins. The Cyborganic project encompasses both the commercial and communal dimensions of the group and analyzing the interrelation of these strands is vital to understanding SOMA's distinct milieu of innovation. Work such as Saxenian's has been pioneering in re-conceptualizing such regions, not as spatial clusters of clearly defined firms, but as industrial systems where what occurs inside a firm and what occurs outside it are deeply interconnected (1993:1). Yet this analysis extends the field of inquiry beyond formal and commercial organization to informal social networks and the organization of daily life. It argues that the Cyborganic case diverges in significant ways from the Silicon Valley culture on which it draws and that these differences reflect creative resistance to the suburban sprawl, anomie, extreme individualism, aggressive competition, and technostress which—as much as knowledge sharing and collaboration— characterize Silicon Valley culture (Castells & Hall, 21-24; Cohen & Fields). This analysis not only shows the value of dense, place-based, communal ties, in supporting the synergy-generating processes characteristic of milieus of innovation, it also indicates that this value is difficult to scale. Despite the power of technology to augment and deterritorialize social interaction, the Cyborganic case reveals that place, community, and factors such as group size continue to play important roles in making that interaction meaningful and productive. It indicates that even in network society geography matters as much as in the past, but in different ways. Thus, it suggests limits to extending Cyborganic's specific formula for innovation beyond the local community that coalesced in San Francisco's Mission/SOMA district in the early 1990s. However, as a long-term study of the practices and values by which individuals acted collectively to build a local community using network technology and organization, this research also suggests alternatives not revealed in earlier economic, sociological, and planning studies on Silicon Valley as a milieu of high technology innovation.