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Well, it's official. On Friday evening, we named the Smart21 Communities of 2010 at a ceremony hosted by the Swedish Consulate General in New York City, in honor of Stockholm's position as our current Intelligent Community of the Year. (We also announced publication of our new book, Future Cities,
which will soon be out on Amazon.com. I hope you saw the charming
address by lead editor Dr. Joseph Pelton on our Web site last night.
We'll have an archive version available soon.)
I'm pleased to
have Dundee, Scotland - a Top Seven community in 2007 and 2008 - back
on the Smart21 list in 2010. One big surprise: a single American
state, Virginia, added three names to the 2010 list. That's one up on
the Province of New Brunswick, Canada, which had two Smart21
communities last year. Of course, they both went on to join the Top
Seven. So we'll see how the Virginians do this year. On Friday, we
also welcomed one Chinese and two Australian communities to the list,
as well as three more from Canada. I don't know what these Canadians
drink, but I wish somebody would give me some. There have been more of
them on the Smart21 list than from any other nation.
You can read profiles of them all on our Web site. Producing those profiles taught me an interesting lesson about digital inclusion.
The selections were made final on Tuesday. By Wednesday, I had found
time to write only about only four of the 21. I was at a conference
most of the day Thursday. So it was late afternoon when I got home,
full of ambition to buckle down and, as the comedian Larry the Cable Guy puts it, "get 'er done."
The
house was dark when I entered and I started switching on lights.
Darned if the first bulb wasn't burned out. Funny thing, though: so
was the second. I noticed that all the digital clocks were blank and
it slowly dawned on me. We had no power. This happens every once in a
while for a minute or two, usually because a tree branch knocks out a
power line. Not this time. After 15 minutes went by, I called the
power company and learned that power had been out for an hour already
and they couldn't predict when it would be restored. Hmm. I started
work on my laptop, grateful for a battery with five hours of life to
it. The autumn day drew to a close, the house grew chilly, and I was
soon working by the light of an old oil lamp we keep around. Not as
romantic as it sounds. Worse than the eye-strain was the fact that I
couldn't double-check any facts or call up information we keep on our
online collaboration platform. No power, no router, no broadband.
There I was on the outside of the broadband economy, racing the clock
to meet an important deadline for a think tank that studies the
economic impact of - you guessed it - broadband.
And then
it occurred to me. The library! Lights! Heat! Broadband! I drove
to the town library and was soon back online. Like communities around
the world, mine had turned its library into an access point for those
without computers or broadband access. Not a big breakthrough.
Nothing to put on the home page of your favorite news Web site. But
for me, it was a lifesaver. There are good logical reasons why we made
digital inclusion one of our five Intelligent Community Indicators,
on which our award program and all our research are based. But it
wasn't until Thursday night that I understood the emotional cost of
being on the other side of the digital divide. In the life of this
knowledge worker at least, broadband has become like oxygen. No big
deal - until you have to go without it.
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