The San Francisco Resilience System's Distributed Smart Grid and Sustainability

Empowering Sustainability in San Francisco’s Neighborhoods

Using a Cloud Computing-based Distributed Smart Grid

There is a saying that trends are built in San Francisco, and when these innovations (born in the Bay Area and tested in California) hit New York, they are already beginning to fundamentally change the world we live in.

Overview

The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the largest concentrations of high technology companies and venture capital firms in the world.  As a result of its innovative cultures, history of strong earthquakes, and the recent economic downturn in California under conditions of rapid global change, the City of San Francisco is ratcheting up not only its emergency preparedness, but also its resilience and sustainability initiatives.  The goal is to create a new type of vibrant citizen-based leadership facing forward into the 21^st century that enables San Francisco neighborhoods and communities of interest to thrive under otherwise uncertain and challenging times.

San Francisco understands that it has both an opportunity and a core responsibility to be one of the most resilient cities in the world.  It is more broadly understood that with San Francisco achieving its own resilience and sustainability,  it will inevitably lead to breakthroughs in sustainable economic development and enhanced emergency management in ways that will become widely emulated.  As a result, many eyes are on San Francisco, as it is exploring the best ways of developing its Web 3.0 San Francisco Resilience System on a cloud computing-based distributed smart grid – architected to engage a third “industrial” revolution forged from interconnected breakthroughs in communication and energy.

San Francisco has already made great progress in developing empowerment neighborhoods.  However, to meet the strategic challenges of the years and decades ahead under conditions of global change, the citizens and leaders of this great city understand that it must build a forward-leaning 21^st century infrastructure for fully engaging the resilience and sustainability of its citizenry in each of the City’s 120 neighborhoods. The San Francisco Resilience System will not only advance the City’s health status, emergency preparedness and response capabilities; It will also enable agile exploration of the best mechanisms to engage a thriving culture of resilience under conditions of rapid change.

San Francisco’s diverse and thriving cultures share a high quality of life and have long roots in innovation and collective democratic intelligence.  In the years ahead, however, San Francisco’s citizens will have an opportunity to further enhance their quality life, functional life capacity and state of preparedness, by tapping into the San Francisco Resilience System’s rapidly evolving set of parallel processing networks -- engaging informed citizens with access to unprecedented levels of open, linked public knowledge creation, as well as knowledge reception capabilities, through intelligent social networks and crowd-sourcing systems. 

The San Francisco Resilience System will enable San Franciscans to make sense of trillions of transactions flowing between billions of linked sensors, cell phones, and computers.  Perhaps, one way to understand the significance of all of this is to say that San Francisco’s cultures are about to take on attributes of what might be considered to be a resilient, highly intelligent “societal mind.” 

The San Francisco Resilience System’s knowledge management capabilities, utilizing  the Bay Area’s emerging linked supercomputing environments through cloud computing, are being built on the knowledge provided by San Francisco’s citizens themselves from their neighborhoods up.  They are collectively creating not only an emerging platform of intelligent social networks, but also local food production, local energy production, service credit banks, and other sustainable practices well adapted for a mid-21^st century environment.  The San Francisco Resilience System is providing San Franciscans not only with unprecedented situational awareness, but also with an agile system for participation in collectively shaping their world.

As an outcome, San Franciscans will continue to expand their quality of life and functional life capacity, even during challenging times.   They will have a collective capacity for living well and contributing fully, while anticipating, preparing for, responding to, and capturing best outcomes for themselves, their families, neighborhoods, and their communities of interest locally, regionally, and globally in emerging opportunities, as well as in crises.  As a result, the San Francisco Resilience System provides a platform for the collective benefit of the citizens of San Francisco and the evolving San Francisco cultures that they are shaping in these times of rapid global change. 

The San Francisco Resilience System is being designed to integrate Resilience Networks, as holonic nested sub-systems to enable each neighborhood to stand alone, if necessary, in disasters, but also to provide a platform for building out vibrant local green economies linked to local, regional, and global markets, energy systems, and diverse social ecologies.  Real-time data on health, human security, energy, water, sanitation, emerging business opportunities and a myriad of other factors influencing health, human security, and prosperity will be available to the citizens of San Francisco in the form of locally-driven knowledge management systems with easy-to-understand dashboards at the neighborhood, city level, regional level, state level, and national level.  As a fifth generation management and governance system and complex adaptive system, the San Francisco Resilience System will enable state-of the-art convergence of Web 3.0 intelligent social networks providing San Franciscans with the agility and intelligence to collaborate and compete as necessary to enhance resilience and sustainability under even the most significant strategic challenges.