History of Founding SVTAGS

Founding of Silicon Valley -Technology, Art, Green and Sustainability (SVTAGS)

2006 the idea of Silicon Valley -Technology, Art, Green and Sustainability (SVTAGS) came to Heather Durham while she had a client in the Sunset House of Innovation (also to referred to as the Popular Science House).

Ms. Durham thought up the acronym TAGS for Technology, Art, Green and Sustainability, but TAGS was taken by a Meta tags company at the time. SVTAGS was born and she bought the website names SVTAGS.org and SVTAGS.com with the intention of putting up an informational site for people to go to learn about topics and events related to Technology, Art, Green and Sustainability.

Since she had a full time job and did not have time to work on this she put the idea on hold. The first meeting was on March 8th 2007. A group of friends showed up and talked about her idea. Jane Jerome, Jackie Chartier and Dominic Boinich were some of those friends. Again, this idea did not really go any where as they all had full time work, but this planning meeting was a good one!

In the late summer of 2008 a friend mentioned that the show he had been producing for 13 years was going to have to move time slots that it aired on (from 7:30pm to some other time that the non-profit station picked). He was upset that his time slot was going to change and he told Heather that the non-profit station was looking for producers.

She had the ah ha moment once again and thought “I could do this with SVTAGS, this could be a perfect platform for this information.”

After making a few calls she found a person that was working with this new non-profit station. She called and left a message. They called back in less then a day.

In another day she got an email back saying yes- please come to a free orientation. If you liked what you hear, then you could become a member of CreaTV San Jose. They said ,” submit a show plan.” She did, something she had writing for the Web site, she edited and turned in. Next step -take a producer’s class and then start filming shows if you like.

Ms. Durham’s schedule was very busy, but she finally got into the monthly orientation in December of 2008.

She took a producers class in January 2009. By February she had taken the producers class and then I started to produce the SVTAGS show.

In one year she has produced 25 shows that have been filmed at CreaTV San Jose. She has also filmed on location at 21 places and is currently working on producing a magazine style show.

On the horizon for Heather Durham and SVTAGA: Speaking engagements, events, blogging and other publishing. Stay tuned for more on this site, on http://twitter.com/SVTAGS and on http://svtags.blogspot.com.