For Mason McCaull and Roberson, the local-to-global phenomenon has meant that they can tap into such local talent as John Ervin, a veteran programmer who knew Bill Gates when Gates was just trying to get Microsoft off the ground. It also means they’ve been able to contract with a search engine optimization expert in the Philippines, a graphic designer in nearby San Francisco, and software developers in India.

“This is not news to companies like Cisco or HP,” Mason McCaull says. “But it was impossible for a company like ours 10 years ago. You know, those companies have been operating globally for a really long time and doing it through a sort of top-down hierarchical coordination. We can do it at a peer-level coordination with just a few people and a dozen contractors. That’s a pretty big revolution.”

They’ve been able to get a company off the ground from a home base in the heart of one of the most beautiful regions in the United States—without insane commutes or compromises to the quality of their product. And since their products are software and consulting services, they can be sold to anyone from Madison Avenue to another small town.

“It is in the DNA of our own company,” says Roberson. “Our company is very flexible and adaptable, and so we have a local focus in that we really like to use local resources when we can. But we realize that we have to grab the talent when the opportunity is there and wherever it may be.”

That local-to-global gene is in the DNA of other companies in Sonoma as well. And they don’t have to be software companies, by any stretch.

If Mason McCaull’s and Roberson’s software and consulting companies are one form of the phenomenon and Vode is another, there’s a third form—one less interested in profits, perhaps, and more interested in doing good.

Fred Johnson of South American Secrets—a small store on the town square of Sonoma—started his career working in nongovernmental aid organizations in South America, particular the Afro-Ecuadorian community. But he said he found much of the money that came into those organizations wound up in officials’ pockets instead going to the people it was meant to help.

So he set up a business. “I’m buying and starting up cottage industries in these communities,” he says. You can find those items made in Ecuador and imported to the little storefront in Sonoma. It’s just the start of a business he hopes to grow to other communities in South and Central America.

But Johnson isn’t content to stop with the supply side. He’s building up a Web presence that will ultimately allow his selling side to go as international as his importing side. “I would hope it will eclipse what we do here,” he says. “I don’t see why it can’t.”

And Roberson and Mason McCaull are, through the nonprofit Wired Sonoma they began, working with the publisher of the Sonoma Index-Tribune to start an incubator for local-to-global companies like their own in a building the Index-Tribune no longer uses. It will house their companies’ offices, as well as other startups.

Mason McCaull thinks of what’s going on in her own town and business as powerful evidence that changes in the way we work and live are on the way—and that those changes could be very much for the better.

She points out that it has been about 100 to 130 years since the industrial revolution took men out of the house, and then with women’s rights, women left the house as well. The car created suburbia and removed the worker from the community where he or she worked. Now, with companies such as her own that are tapped into both the global and local economies, life doesn’t have to be that way.

“What excites me about these technologies that will offer virtualization and staffing is—and the reorganization of a small town is—that, you know, you can live close to where you work and…not have to compromise,” she says. For Sonoma in particular, “That’s really an exciting development for this community. It means we’re not just tourism and wine.”