Intelligent Communities

Live from Building the Broadband Economy #5

We are hearing from Professor Cheol-Soo Parkof SungKyunKwan University in Suwon, who was designated by the city's Mayor to represent him at Building the Broadband Economy.  ICF's co-founder John Jung, who visited Suwon, is leading the discussion. Suwon is the home city of Samsung, which has a big impact on its economy.  The city administration has made massive investments in e-government and networks to create a ubiquitous online environment for connecting to crime prevention, fire prevention, traffic information, e-learning and citizen services.  John pointed out that Asian cities are unique in requiring a large amount of documentation from citizens.  Much of Suwon's work has focused on putting this paper trail online to vastly simplify the lives of citizens.  In the process, they have created a transparent government, in which all processes are visible and the integrity of its operations is assured.  Suwon is also a major investor in business parks and industrial complexes, providing cheap land and attractive commercial terms for developers.  The city government also encourages the formation of large numbers of public-private joint ventures to stimulate the formation of businesses in leading-edge technologies.  The third leg of the stool is an active matching program between labor demand and supply, backed by strong re-education programs to keep employee skills up to date.  Samsung has been an important backer by providing major scholarships for lower-income students to gain an education and get into the pipeline to employment.  Education in Korea is very competitive; it is viewed as the key factor for success in life and the highest priority of society.  Suwon has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrading its educational infrastructure.  This has included the development of international language schools, including one that specifically aims to support the children of expatriates working in South Korea (and making Suwon a particularly attractive location for them).  In Suwon, economic growth has given the community the power to begin sharing their good fortune with other nations.  The city funds development programs for cities in Cambodia to give back some of their good fortune.  The same spirit informs Suwon's programs to provide digital skills training to tens of thousands of low-income and less-educated citizens in order to ensure their inclusion.  One of the first Korean words that foreigner learn is "bali," which means "fast."  Koreans like things to be fast.  Suwon strives to make its society deliver information anywhere, any time to any device to make its citizens' lives productive and happy.

Live from Building the Broadband Economy #4

We are listening to the Mayor Larry O'Brian of Canada's capital city, Ottawa, explain the priorities and practices that helped make the city one of ICF's Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year.  When he first became mayor, there were a handful of technology employers with a workforce of less than 2,000.  It was in the telecom meltdown at the beginning of the last decade that the troubles of those companies spawned dozens of start-ups, many of which have become highly successful.  In the current recession, that pattern is being repeated, aiming at the next generation of technologies from renewable energy to wireless networking.  Ottawa is currently spawning five new companies a week. ICF's Lou Zacharilla pointed out that recessions are dangerous because people can vote with their feet by moving away in search of opportunity.  That has not happened in Ottawa partly because of a great quality of life but also because of countermeasures put in place to spur regeneration.  Mayor O'Brian described Lead to Win, a government-funded project that taps technology managers who lose their jobs with big companies, trains them in entrepreneurship, connects them with partners and potential customers, and provides seed funding.  It is programs like this because have allowed Ottawa to replace the 20,000 low-skilled manufacturing jobs lost in the last recession with higher-skilled jobs in engineering and business.  Factoid: JR Booth was one of Ottawa's founders, a lumber baron who created the largest lumber company, not just in Canada, but in the world.  Entrepreneurship has deep roots.  The tradition is being carried forward by Terry Matthews, a serial entrepreneur whose venture company, Wesley Clover, recruits new graduates from local universities, puts them through an entrepreneur's boot camp, matches them with experienced mentors and gives them a year to create a company.  Lou said he saw something remarkable when he was in Ottawa: a cultural presumption that those who know should mentor those who can benefit from their experience.  It permeates the business and entrepreneurial sectors, and has become instrumental in their success.  A digital media cluster has sprung up, powered by the community's strong broadband assets, and has organized itself.  Mayor O'Brian described attending a cluster meeting and being amazed and pleased that none of the companies appeared to have an exit strategy.  None were growing and grooming their companies for sale but expected to be running them for decades.  He found that an inspiring symbol of Ottawa's future.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Live from Building the Broadband Economy #3

I just finished a very interesting hour speaking in front of the audience with Anette Scheibe (CEO, Kista Science City, Stockholm), David Gourlay (Director Public Sector Business Development, Oracle), Joanne Hovis (CEO, Columbia Telecom Corp.) and Don Norris (CEO, Strategic Initiatives).  We were talking about whether and how ICT can supercharge educational achievement.  We discussed some cool technologies, from the use of social networking in instruction to dressing up lessons as video games in order to make them relevant to students.  But mostly we talked about leadership, organization and infrastructure.  When Fredericton Mayor Brad Woodside, in the audience, spoke passionately about the need for leadership from local government leaders, the panelists were all nodding their heads in agreement.  The biggest impact that community leaders can have, they said, is through exercising that leadership.  Community leaders need to be relentless about promoting educational achievement, and ensure that education does not stop at the school wall.  The demand for lifelong learning requires that ICT be used to deliver educational content 24x7.  It also requires the community to have broadband infrastructure that can provide serious bandwidth to enable multimedia and online collaboration.  But there's another reason to open up the school walls.  Educational outcomes improve when classrooms connect to local business and institutional expertise, which also tends to keep graduating students in the community, where their skills can contribute to local prosperity.  Information and communications technology is the perfect tool to provide this integration, which is where the payoff really lies.

Live from Building the Broadband Economy #2

Kevin MacRitchie - Cisco vice president and Cisco Fellow - Collaborative Broadband & Educational Technologies - is discussing the megatrends that are changing the world.  Ine developed countries, there is an hourglass shape to the population, with large young and  old populations but a smaller group in the productive working years in the middle.  This contrasts with developing nations, where there is more even distribution and overall population growth.  The emerging markets are moving very rapidly into the mainstream of the global economy and will reshape that economy.  Cisco has identified multiple opportunities created by these changes, from the growing Internet of Things to enabling people to live a connected life in every aspect of work, play and life.  The world isn't flat, he says, it is spiky.  A graph showing where patents are filed, there are huge spikes in big cities in industrialized economies.  Does that mean Africa and Latin America don't matter?  No, it means that we have not yet figured out how to reach them.   Kevin described a project he worked on for the Indian Air Force.  They reserved a portion of their wireless bandwidth to put self-powered kiosks into Indian villages to give them their first exposure to the Web.  There was a big discussion about whether this would ruin their culture, or would it preserve the culture forever.  The villages are now able to sell some of their products and services on the global stage and finding that connectivity does expand and preserve their culture.  They are committed to giving 100% of their citizens access.  In the 1950s, the most complex technology that schools had to work with was the adding machine.  In today's world, the complexity that educators must master before  they can begin to teach is huge.  We tend to teach the technology and think we're done.  Instead, we should be harnessing these tools to teach young people how to learn.  Today, it's about learning in real time and having access to information before we need it.  We looked at early e-learning and said it's never going to work: it was self-contained, did not connect to other resources, and lacked any access to instructors.  Challenging story of education: if today's e-learning produces the same results as live instruction, who needs live instructors?  Today's educators have to know how to teach students to learn, not just convey information to them.  As we move to a world of continuous learning, we have to encompass from preschool to the end of life. More and more educational content needs to be delivered to adults, who need to be training for their next job while they are in their current one.  Kevin talked about his local school board, which wants to have great schools but does not want to connect education to any local business or expertise.  This is a defeatist model; the biggest problem the town has is that everybody grows up and moves away Kevin talked about offering towns a "one-button snow day.'  If the 50 or 100 overlapping networks for voice, data, video, fire safety, police etc. are converged into one network, it becomes possible.  The network knows that if it's a snow day, the thermostats don't need to be turned up.  Teachers can receive emails telling them to say home.  Students can receive emails and voicemails announcing closure.  Converged networks can have major financial impacts.  A study Kevin lead for the State of Michigan, where he lives, showed that a $1bn investment in network convergence would save the state $1bn per year in costs.  That's a no-brainer decision.  Do your children want to learn Chinese?  Why should they have to have a local instructor, when high-def videoconferencing could connect them to instructors in China?  There are billions of learners in cities, rural areas, universities and lifelong learners who need to be served, and smart connected technologies make it possible.

Live from Building the Broadband Economy #1

I'm in the audience at our Building the Broadband Economy summit, where Jerry Hultin, President of Polytechnic Institute, is explaining Polytechnic's incubator program, which is written up in today's Wall Street Journal.   In a story about the City of New York, he told about how the city lost A&T to neighboring New Jersey back in the 1970s, but is now finding that it cannot retain the best and brightest computer scientists by asking them to live in Bedminster or Basking Ridge.  So it is moving its cybersecurity labs back into the City of New York.  The quality of cities is going to determine where people live, in a world where you can live anywhere and work anywhere.  Dr. Hultin also praised China for the seriousness, scale and intensity they are bringing to scientific research, which is identifying all of the critical-path issues facing the world and assembling a research agenda to attack them.  Our master of ceremonies, John Jung, has just introduced a delegation from Chengdu, China, whom he met while traveling in China for the past three weeks.  Nice round of applause for people who have come from the far side of the planet to join us at Building the Broadband Economy.  Up next: a fascinating presentation from Kevin MacRitchie of Cisco Systems.

I have an abiding interest in a question that is on the mind of every parent able to afford today's marvels of networking, the mobile phone and personal computer.  What impact is all of the Facebooking, Twittering, texting and now Formspringing having on the development of the next generation?  (More on Formspring in a moment.)  In the last chapter of our book, Broadband Economies, I wrote about the tide of research in the Nineties on the psychological impact of Internet use.  "If we take this research at face value," I wrote, "the conclusion is clear.  The Web is a destroyer of social capital.  Power it up with broadband, and you have the makings of a virtual plague laying waste your community."  Really?  I get impatient with claims that the moral universe is shredding because the kids do things differently than we did.  Human has been making this claim for about 10,000 years, and the moral universe appears to be holding its own.  All change brings negatives and positives.  Our current situation has negatives and positives - something we tend to forget in the face of change. When change does come, we usually focus on the negatives because we recognize them.  Our kids are head down with the smartphone, texting away and ignoring the world.  Obviously, a bad thing.  They are permanently plugged into video games or Facebook pages.  Clearly a waste of time and bringer of bad influences.  We don't see the positives because, in most cases, we don't have a mental framework for understanding them. Three recent articles in The New York Times point to new research and our ongoing lack of real knowledge about the human-machine interface as it affects young people.  On May 5th, Tamar Lewin wrote about a new social networking site, Formspring.me.  ("Teenage Insults, Scrawled on Web, Not on Walls.")  Think of it as an anonymous Facebook.  Or as Lewin puts it, "It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip."  Kids register, then link it to their Facebook or Twitter account.  Anyone visiting their page can post anonymous comments and questions.  "Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly -- leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits."  Lewin interviewed Christine Ruth, a middle school counselor in Lindwood, New Jersey.  "I'd never heard of Formspring until yesterday, but when I started asking kids, every seventh and eighth grader I asked said they used it.  In seventh grade, especially, it's a lot of 'Everyone knows you're a slut,' or 'You're ugly.' It seems like even when it's inappropriate and vicious, the kids want the attention, so they post it. And who knows what they're getting that's so devastating that they don't post it?"  Okay, raise your hand if you think that's bad.  Me, too.  A May 2nd article by Hilary Stout cited research from the Pew Research Center, which ICF is presenting with a Founders Award on May 21.  ("Antisocial Networking?"  It found that half of American teenagers send 50 or more text messages a day, while one-third send more than 100 a day.  Fifty-four percent said they text their friends once a day but only 33% said they talk to their friends face-to-face on a daily basis.  According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Americans between the ages of 8 and 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours daily using some sort of electronic device.  What does it all mean?  Is the ease of electronic communication making young people less interested in face-to-face communication with their friends?  Psychologists are worried, because close childhood relationships help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships.  (Heck, I have wanted to throw away my wife's BlackBerry more than once in the past couple of months, and we've been married for three decades.)  One neuroscientist, Gary Small, came up with a term for these kids who have grown up using computers and mobile phones: "digital natives."  He argues that the new natives of the 21st Century are great with technology but weak on face-to-face human contact.   One parent quoted in the article, Beth Cafferty, who is also a teacher, disagreed.  She said that the hundreds of texts her 15-year-old daughter sends each day are good.  "I actually think they're closer because they're more in contact with each other - anything that comes to my mind, I'm going to text you right away."  We just don't know.  The other thing we always forget about change: it is a learning process.  Writing in today's Times, Laura Holson reported on the coming-of-age of 21-year-old Min Liu, who has suddenly realized that stuff posted on her Facebook page could be seen by people from whom she hopes to get a job.  ("Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline.")  She is busy removing photos and posts and asking her friends to do the same.  More than half of young adults surveyed by the University of Berkley in April said that they were more concerned about online privacy than they were five years ago.  As they come to grips with the positives and negatives of their digital identities, young people are adapting.  They are carefully controlling who sees what, and feeling every more mistrustful of the Facebooks of the world, whose carelessness with their private information keeps making headlines.  Even Formspring may find its moment in the spotlight to be short-lived.  A 14-year-old interviewed by the Times' Lewin reported ""We all got Formspring about two months ago, when it began showing in people's Facebook status.  It's actually gone down a little bit in the past few weeks, at least in my grade, because a lot of people realized it wasn't a good thing, that people were getting hurt, or posting awful comments."  The young, massive online audience can make you a star in minutes but they can also relegate you to the rubbish heap just as fast. I have an abiding interest in this topic because the answers really matter.  I instinctively believe that the culture of use being forged by today's digital natives will be a net positive once we integrate it properly into our lives.  But gut feel is not the same as knowledge.  I am an immigrant in the digital nation, not a native.  You probably are, too.  We both have to keep in mind just how little we really know.  Photo credit: John Shumaker, 17, on Facebook at his home in Lafayette, Calif. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

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You can actually feel the difference between an emerging economy and a mature one.  I recall it from trips to Malaysia and India.  When you visit a place where the economy is growing like mad, there is electricity in the air.  It's the energy of hope.  People might not have any more idea where they're going than I do, but they know they're going somewhere and that it's going to be big.  In large, mature economies, on the other hand, the highs and lows are muted.  There's a lot more to lose and less faith in what there is to be gained.  Like big ships at sea, they take a long time to get up to speed and a long time to turn in a new direction. 

I have not had the privilege of visiting Suwon, South Korea - that opportunity went to my colleague John Jung - but I bet I know what it feels like.  I have just finished writing their Top Seven Intelligent Community profile on our Web site, and I recognize the attitude.  It says "let's get it done."  The 1997 Asian economic crisis made Mayor Yong Seo Kim and his leadership team lose faith in a future that depended on South Korea's enormous chaebol companies.  So, they set about building an economy whose growth would be based on small-to-midsize enterprises (SMEs) specializing in IT, biotech and nanotechnology. 

And they got it done.  Fast forward a few years, and Suwon was home to three new industrial complexes and nine multi-tenant technology buildings.  The new Kwangkyo Techno Valley campus is now full of research institutes set up by business, universities and government working hand in hand.   

South Korea already has one of the finest broadband infrastructures in the world, but Mayor Kim and his team wanted ICT to be ubiquitous in Suwon.  They got it done.  A lot of investment later, the U-Happy Master Plan had created a 1 Gbps e-government network.  They integrated systems for taxation, real estate, public health and safety, transportation and city administration, and put them online.  An e-services gateway handled 600,000 transactions last year from 10 million unique visitors. 

In its nomination for the Top Seven, Suwon wrote that "Investment in education is one of the most sound and rational outlays of capital that a government can make."  Between 2002 and 2009, the city backed up that proposition by investing more than US$360m in upgrading school facilities, opening new schools and expanding staff. 

Globalization is much on their minds.  So they opened the Happy Suwon English Village in 2006 to offer intensive learning in the global language of business to 7,000 elementary school students per year.  A new Suwon Village of Foreign Languages, which opens this year, will offer the same environment for Chinese and Japanese.  In 2007, Suwon established the Gyeonggi Suwon Foreign School.  It aims to make the city a premier destination for expatriates with families working for Korean multinationals.  And with all of this focus on languages, they are not exactly ignoring technology.  The city holds an annual Suwon Invention Competition for students and sends contestants to the World Innovation Olympiad every year.  Since 2004, Suwon has organized an annual Information & Science Festival, which attracts 60,000 paid registrants to a National e-Sports Competition, National Intelligent Robot Competition, Professional Gamers Exhibition and much more. 

It's not as though the global recession missed South Korea.  Well, okay, technically speaking, growth never quite turned negative, because the government poured in fiscal stimulus.  But from November 2008 through March 2009, exports slumped every month by double-digit amounts.  When your economy has been growing 7-10% for years, that feels like a recession.   The difference is attitude.  While government and business in Europe and North America have been obsessed with how much and how fast to cut, Suwon has been thinking about how to win the next round of the economic game.  They may not know exactly where they are going, but they know they are going somewhere, and it's going to be big.

Until the US financial industry imploded in 2009, columnists like the New York Times' Tom Friedman wrote despairing editorials about America's best young minds, who were graduating from university and going to work for hedge funds and brokerages.  There, they were put to work developing those exotic financial instruments that, we now know, turned out to be so much toxic junk.  It's a challenge for industrialized nations to interest their young people in science, technology, engineering and math or STEM.  Not so in the racing economies of China, South Korea, India, Brazil and other emerging economic powers.  There, it is clear to everyone where the future lies: in making things and delivering services that require extreme technology skills. 

So, how does a community in an industrialized nation interest its youth in STEM and route them into careers in companies clamoring for their talents?  For a compelling example, see our profile of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, one of our Top Seven Intelligent Communities of 2010.  (A quick log-in is required.)  Ottawa is Canada's capital.  So naturally, you would expect the most highly valued skills there to be lawyering and navigating bureaucracy.  But Ottawa is determined to be recognized less for governing and more for innovating in the technologies of the 21st Century.   

Recent history makes that challenging.  When the 2001-02 telecom recession hit, it decimated Ottawa's communications sector, which includes Nortel, Newbridge Networks, Cognos and Mitel.  Today, Nortel is in bankruptcy, having been unable to withstand the competition from such Chinese innovators as Huawei and ZTE.  As telecom moved from regional darling to regional dog, enrollment in secondary school science and math programs plummeted.  That soon translated into lower science and engineering enrollment at the university level.  The tech sector recovered but interest in science and engineering education did not.

By 2008, Ottawa's economic development organization, OCRI, its universities and its entrepreneurs were doing something about it.  New programs included a Specialist High Skills Major for grades 11 and 12 that focused on ICT, and a High School Technology Program that sent students into companies to create software projects.  Universities joined in with courses in entrepreneurship and e-business, graduate programs in computer modeling and game animation, new schools of media & design and a bachelor of engineering in sustainable energy. 

The community has also focused on the "last mile" between the end of education and the start of employment. It's the golden moment when the most talented students face a choice of where to start their careers.  TalentBridge is a program that provides entrepreneurially-inclined university students with part-time jobs at local technology companies, paid by local government, where they work under experienced mentors.  The companies get the benefit of fresh thinking and new energy, while students gain business experience and often make the move into full-time positions with the companies.

Ottawa serial entrepreneur Terry Matthews has created the Wesley Clover Affiliate Program, which identifies the brightest and most motivated new graduates, puts them through a "boot camp" training program for 9-12 months, and then pairs them with industry leaders in specific sectors.  The aim is to introduce a new product into the market within 12 months.  That's a smart move for an investor like Matthews, and a great contribution to Ottawa's future. 

I'm glad that serious thinkers publicly worry about young people who would rather get an MBA than a computer science or engineering degree.  In our Facts & Figures Library, there is an interesting opinion piece by columnist Ralph Gomery called "The Innovation Delusion."  He believes that Americans - including Tom Friedman - are fooling themselves if they think they can have a vibrant tech sector in this country but let the manufacturing happen somewhere else.  Whether he's right or wrong, it's an important discussion to have.  But it is not the thinkers who impress me most.  It is the doers - the Intelligent Communities like Ottawa that don't just shake their heads about the future, but roll up their sleeves and get to work creating a better one.  

When you travel to cities to undertake a review one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities of the Year, you just never know what you can expect. My fellow Co-Founders Robert Bell and Lou Zacharilla can probably tell you other stories, but in the process of reviewing these applications for ICF's Intelligent Community of the Year, we get to see a lot about a community: the highs of their political, economic and cultural excellence, as well as possibly the lows.

For instance in Eindhoven (Brainport), Holland recently, I discovered that the region was the home of Vincent van Gogh and his family. I had just seen an exciting exhibit of rare paintings and personal letters by Vincent to his brother Theo at the Royal Academy the week before in London and now I was going to actually see the shed where he painted his famous Potato Eaters painting. If that wasn't enough, I was given the opportunity to stay in The Netherland's famous Smart Home for three nights in Eindhoven. Although challenged with the language, I was able to master the various buttons and levers to work everything in the Smart Home. It was quite an intuitive experience and an extraordinary opportunity, but it was not the most surprising while in Eindhoven. I was a bit surprised to learn that I would be looking at the underbelly of their society. I thought that was what I had heard, but actually what I wound up looking at was a very pregnant belly of a woman going into labour and here I was, moments later, being encouraged to deliver a baby, no less.

Now how does a guy who sits most days in front of a computer or in a boardroom find himself in an operating room about to deliver a new born baby? Were my recent honorary degrees somehow interpreted as actually being a doctor? Was something lost in translation? I was in Eindhoven to undertake an examination of the vitals of the community, not the vitals of a woman about to deliver a baby. Well, I guess anything goes in the world of ICF.

So let me explain a bit more. I was about to observe the digital monitoring rooms of a health simulation centre where doctors and their team of nurses practice on simulation, observed by other doctors in remote locations. This was supposed to be all about high-speed broadband and its applications. But the program shifted gears and that day's scenario revolved around a woman driving her car at high-speed and has an accident. She is brought to the operating room that we are observing over dozens of monitors.

Our facility shifts into panic mode when it is discovered that she is pregnant and needs an emergency C section or else lose the baby. I was prepared to monitor this in my comfortable chair sipping a latte.  Instead I was given a white doctor's uniform and quickly shepherded into the bright and busy operating room. Others around me were busy with their tasks and one nurse was calming the woman down. The patient was going into shock and there was a new sense of panic as the monitors around me buzz, bleep and whiz. All foreign sounds to me. What am I doing here?

Slipping on rubber gloves, I am handed a scalpel and instructed with a sense of urgency to slice the belly where marked. I do this as instructed. I am then given scissors to complete the job. The gynecologist instructs me to now finish the job by pulling the baby out of the woman's womb through the incision I had just made. I do as I'm told and there is great excitement around us. All this excitement in the span of about 60 seconds. The woman's vital signs improve and the nurse announces that the baby's vital signs are good as well. Apparently there was a photographer imbedded in the delivery room, hence the photograph in the newspaper the next day.

I wonder how many people looking at the picture realize that the woman was a very sophisticated wifi-enabled simulator and while she moves her head and eyes and mouth as if she were real, she wasn't. The belly looked quite realistic; but believe me, I sliced into a rubber doll and nothing else.

After that excitement I continued on to witness a driverless bus by a local firm called Phelia in Brainport's Automotive Campus that uses sensors and magnets to remember its driving track, speed and docking capabilities. Eindhoven purchased a fleet of these buses and developed a 10km route with magnets imbedded into the road between Eindhoven's train station and the airport that could be used by the driverless bus. I wonder if that is where the woman had her accident? Wait a minute, it's all simulation.

Of the many communities that I have visited over the years, the smallest U.S. county built on the "Arlington Way" is among the most unusual and most successful. Described as a collaboration of citizens, businesses and government, it seems to be in a constant process of collaboration aimed at "slowing down the planning and development process" to allow for thoughtful and insightful input by the dozens of neighborhood committees, commissions and task forces. Once a plan is established, I am told, it is important in "Arlington Way" fashion to ensure consistency at seeing the long term plan through to its ultimate conclusion. And it shows. Where a sea of parking lots surrounded a failing Home Depot, the hub is now home to upscale Whole Foods and Harry's Tap Grill, accessible by well designed streets and treed sidewalks.

The make-up of the community also hosts immigrants and a broad mix of new comers coming to Arlington for residential opportunities adjacent to the Nation's capital. But today many of the people actually find work in Arlington. The sense of community is deep. Young, single and tech savvy, many residents and workers give their time freely to participate in commissions and committees. With a high level of education and sense of community commitment, many are on multiple commissions and committees. "It's hard for the leadership to argue with the opinion of judges, Nobel Laureates, international negotiators and experts in fields ranging from medicine to international development." It is after all, I am reminded, the world in one place. "We have over 100 languages spoken in this community and as a community, it is very inclusive and welcoming to all people from around the world interested in contributing. But it is well known that collaboration becomes more difficult as a community grows. It will be Arlington's challenge to maintain that sense of collaboration as the community continues to attract more people to the county.

Photo: Arlington County Board Chair Jay Fisette with Ballston in the background.

Arlington is adjacent to Georgetown in Washington DC, but feels like a major city with 30 storey high rises and densities that are attractive to young couples and families between the ages of 24-35. At a corner in the Ballston neighborhood I see about a dozen individual joggers, dressed in designer running gear, coming and leaving in all directions, and criss-crossing in a pattern that almost feels choreographed. Arlington is attractive to people who work in the defense industry, close to the Pentagon and to Washington's key offices across the river. The Rosslyn-Ballston corridor is a nexus of science and technology related firms, many of whom benefit from the synergy of the close proximity to each other. The other consolidation of firms supporting the business of government and defense is in the Crystal City area, a major spine of high density development adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport.  All of these firms and the people that live and work in them, and their neighboring lower density residential areas benefit from the major transit capabilities in the region. 11 of the 33 stops are in Arlington. The Greater Washington Region has a population of 5.5 million and benefits from the remaining 22 stops. This inordinate benefit that Arlington has is a consequence of geography and history, but it is also a result of determined leadership and the collaboration of many individuals who make up this community. 45 neighborhood committees and a significant number of commissions keep the population in touch and actively engaged. They work together for the betterment of the community; for their families and for their children.          

What is the wow factor in Arlington I asked? I am told without any hesitancy: "It's the committees, commissions and neighborhood groups that make up the county."

The top strategy executive of a telecom firm recently shared with me this pithy sentence: "Structure follows strategy."

It's a good saying, because it expresses two valuable ideas.  First, an organization should be structured to carry out its strategy, not the other way around.  And second, not even the best strategy will work unless you put the right structure in place to accomplish it.

Besides, they are wonderfully hard-edged business terms, aren't they?  You feel wise and powerful just saying them.  Compare that with saying another word that ICF uses far more often.  Collaboration.  It isn't quite the same thrill, is it?  Yet, in Intelligent Communities, lasting transformation is usually the product of collaboration among many partners.  And this year's Smart21 Communities demonstrate that making collaboration pay off takes - you guessed it - both strategy and structure.     

Many  communities take a collaborative approach to developing strategy.  The city of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia assigned a team at the local university to develop a plan called Ballarat ICT 2030.  The work took on the rigor and cross-disciplinary depth of a major research project.  The team consulted with state and local government, local businesses, ICT firms, and community leaders. They identified trends, uncertainties and linkages with the power to shape the city's future.  Over 220 people contributed through interviews, surveys, panel discussions, workshops and briefings over four months.  Stir in a generous portion of data on national and global trends, and the Ballarat ICT 2030 strategy was ready to go.  It called for making the city a globally competitive ICT center by creating the infrastructure (broadband) and support system needed to create, attract and retain tech companies. 

Collaboration can also provide the structure for a project.  In 1994, Besançon, France became the first French city to deploy a metro fiber network, even before the 1998 liberalization of France Telecom. It was a cooperative project of local, regional and national government agencies, which were soon joined by semi-public organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and local university.  Collaboration was structured through co-ownership of the assets, with defined terms for joint network usage and maintenance.  The backbone provided by the cooperative network has enabled Besançon to launch multiple award-winning educational programs.  Interestingly, this approach finds its mirror image in an American community, Cleveland, where a nonprofit called OneCommunity also assembled a fiber network serving members of a public-private cooperative.  The OneCommunity network helped to put the city and greater region (Northeast Ohio) on the list of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year, not once but twice.   

An American member of the Smart21 - Riverside, California - has made collaboration an integral part of both strategy and structure.  After hiring a new city manager to reverse years of drift, Riverside involved leaders from business, government, community groups and the city's four colleges and universities in crafting a vision for the future.  The resulting vision called for Riverside to deploy an advanced broadband infrastructure and use it as a foundation to aggressively attract technology companies to this low-cost location only an hour's drive from Los Angeles.  Those companies, in turn, would generate demand for the thousands of students graduating from the city's universities, who had long taken their skills and earning power elsewhere.  To carry out the strategy, Riverside mayor Ron Loveridge formed a nonprofit corporation called SmartRiverside.  Its board included the CEOs of Riverside's existing high-tech companies.  They formed an advisory group called the CEO Forum, which began issuing recommendations for attracting and retaining tech businesses.  At each stage in the city's development since then, the CEO Forum has played a part, from pushing the hiring of Riverside's first CIO to a decision to deploy a WiFi network for public safety services, citizens and businesses. 

Communities are not businesses.  Decisions are not rendered in executive suites and passed down through the ranks.  Decisions are shaped by politics - the art of the possible - and by culture and recent history, which makes collaboration a necessity and truly effective collaboration a competitive advantage.  But as the Smart21 show, collaboration alone is just a good conversation.   In an Intelligent Community, collaboration follows strategy. 

At the heart of a performance-driven culture for city government is a "Citizen Relationship Management" (CRM) model that provides a single environment to integrate departmental systems to capture, analyze and answer constituent-driven requests. It engages constituents and government employees as key stakeholders, provides streamlined access to government information and services by encouraging interagency IT initiatives that, while improving constituent services, also consolidates disparate systems, decreases paperwork, increases productivity and saves money.

To emphasize this, a model can be found in New York City with an approach that demonstrates how best to deliver this model through executive leadership. Upon taking office in January 2002, newly elected Mayor Michael Bloomberg, inspired by similar systems that were being piloted in a handful of cities nationwide, announced as one of his first acts in office plans for the creation of a 3-1-1 Service Center for New York City. This service acts as a centralized repository for citizens to make requests, lodge complaints or simply get straightforward answers to questions about the city government and its services.

It is now a model of excellence for all municipalities based on the platform supporting service delivery automation with CRM which allows the City to not only more efficiently respond to calls and the program is also designed to proactively address with situations that lead to a high volume of calls or incidents. This proactive approach is what Mayor Bloomberg means when he says, "It's not just a citizen service hot line, it is the most powerful management tool ever developed for New York City government. I can't imagine running the city without it."

Now, the City of New York has delivered on the potential transparency and accessibility functions by launching the Citywide Performance Review (CPR) that is a comprehensive reporting vehicle to track the effectiveness of municipal services based on a series of indicators. It does not discriminate from the good news or the bad news using CRM and Business Intelligence tools that result in dashboards and scorecards for the public to view how well their public resources are used.

Traditionally, CRM has been a commercial business application to provide business a more strategic competitive advantage by delivering a seamless, unified customer experience for interactions regardless of internal organization. Now, CRM is an attractive tool for government organizations as they transform themselves to foster the translation of citizen-relevant data into actionable information by providing the right information to the right person at the right time. Also, CRM embeds a proactive culture as it extends an understanding of citizen needs throughout an enterprise thus enabling all functional areas to make informed, citizen-based decisions. As CRM can capture incoming data from multi-channel inputs, a 3-1-1 program highlights a workflow process for citizen contact, workload tracking process and finally, performance management. With careful thoughtful leadership such as the model Mayor Bloomberg delivered in New York City, a service delivery regime can be transformational, streamline processes and align service and program tasks more seamlessly to drive down costs and enhance decision making.

Several municipal jurisdictions in North America currently have 3-1-1 programs and in Canada, the Region of Halton in Ontario and the City of Calgary are leading the way with their comprehensive business models and tools to support a complete citizen experience. Now we see more opportunities for smaller municipalities to engage in 3-1-1 collaboratively with other communities despite their lower population bases as regionalization of programs that share resources and information regardless whether it is across municipal boundaries or jurisdictions is a major new trend for 3-1-1 and CRM programs to drive better performance reporting.

David Gourlay, an expert in Citizen Relationship Management systems, is the Ottawa-based Director for Business Development, Public Sector, Canada for Oracle Corp.  He can be reached at david.gourlay@oracle.com.

"We have learned that to raise a happy, healthy and hopeful child, it takes a family, it takes teachers, it takes clergy, it takes business people, it takes community leaders, it takes those who protect our health and safety it takes all of us.  Yes, it takes a village."  

So pronounced former First Lady of the United States Hillary Clinton, before an audience in Chicago 14 years ago.  Ever the politician, Mrs. Clinton then shouted in her best political twang:  "And Chicago is my kind of village!" 

At that time she was quoting from her controversial book, It Takes a Village.  While her idea seemed radical at the time, mainly because of its political ideas, it identified a rooted challenge in an era of increased social mobility and economic and technological transformation.  On the day in 1996 when Mrs. Clinton spoke, the Internet was in its infancy, along with billions of the planet's inhabitants who today use broadband and the web as part of their daily experience.  They have used the digital experience to create communities in their own image. 

Like Mrs. Clinton, they intuitively had it right: we live in relationship, not in isolation.  If the physical community cannot comply to our collective need, a virtual one will emerge.  Borrowing a phrase from Africa, she thus began a revival of an old idea concerning the strength of communities.  It is collective.  "Strength in numbers" is an old political axiom, which usually refers to voters.  However, in the era of the new community, it is unabashedly an acknowledgment of collaboration. 

I think the title of Mrs. Clinton's book, as much as the book itself, began to set the tone for how I think about the new community.  ICF has begun to understand what it really takes to become a successful village or community in the new century.  Politics has trailed along.  At the community level, in many cases, it has even led.  As we head toward naming another intelligent community of the year I would say that we are still only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.

A new tribalism has become visible on the horizon.  Not one that is collectivist as were attempts to have a central state plan the lives of citizens.  Nor "tribal" in the sense of being defined or organized in response to an enemy, or an external threat.  But rather one that is capable of delivering the promise of a safe and more wholesome community.  Like explorers setting out to chart a new land or, closer to home for me, a satellite exploring the edges of the universe and all of the excitement that generates, our criteria is a new type of map.  It has allowed hundreds of communities to begin to search for their future, and understand its potential by looking at successful places. 

The Role of Culture

I wrote in my 31 December blog that the culture within a community, especially an intelligent community, is yielding an as-yet unmeasured gross domestic local product.  This GDLP comes not from the presence of museums, historic sites of interest or hotels developed to accommodate and house tourists.  While these are attractive features for any community, and famously so in cases such as Bilbao, Spain through its Guggenheim Museum or in Hong Kong, through its new West Kowloon development, they are not the raw materials needed to generate the "economy of the creative culture."  Their virtue is that they are promoted in the business and travel sections of newspapers and magazines, which adds luster to a community for tourists.  They also help to attract real estate investments, add money to the tax rolls and produce livable wages for workers and managers in the services sector.  Curators of museums, as well as other professionals, do even better.  However, in my view, they are byproducts of what a local culture is capable of truly producing.  In a sense, they are fossilized unless identified and used as a source of innovation. 

To quote another political figure from the era of the Clinton presidency, former Vice President and Nobel Laureate, Al Gore, is right when he says that "political will is a renewable resource."  The suggestion is that innovation and vision, expressed in political terms, will produce new energy.  If this is the case, I believe that it is also true that local culture is both a renewable resource and imperishable.  It is the gold mine we should rush to exploit.

When a local culture is harnessed to broadband and telecom, it receives new potency and invigorates an old "investment."  The investment is a complex one to readily define, but one that is familiar.  So familiar that we take it for granted.  Yet it is the continuously reinforced, and reinforcing, experience of community life.  No matter where we are, community life persists through our daily, vibrant spectrum of experience.  We richen ourselves in direct proportion to our pride of place, educational experiences, ancestral identification, economic status and our ambition and desire.  The "village" includes a particular history, language and its social customs. 

It can be revealed in a flash.  I cannot forget a presentation made by Darrell Ohokannoak, chairman of Nunavut Broadband.  Nunavut is Canada's third Arctic territory and was named a Smart21 community by ICF in 2006.  We knew that Nunavut had developed a broadband company and an infrastructure to connect its 28 communities, all of them remote, in an attempt to tackle harsh unemployment and an increasing disappearance of its cultural essence. 

While beginning his presentation at a summit of Canadian Intelligent Communities, organized by MISA, I expected another interesting Powerpoint presentation with graphs, bullet points and a quote here and there for emphasis.  Instead, we saw beautiful photographs of what seemed like someone's family vacation, but far more unique.

"My apologies for not having words for you," he began slowly  "But we are a visual people and we tell stories."  He paused.  "We use our imagination."  In four words he had explained a persistent quality of his community and one that would inform its unique economic offering.  Using imagination and knowledge of communications technology, Nunavut had been enabled by the power of broadband via satellite.  The satellite connected it to the world.  Over time it managed to use the Internet to bring to market its unique tribal art, which thanks to its e-commerce site found markets outside of its frosty region. 

The community had reached into its own core, brought forward its collective imagination and harnessed it to broadband and related technology and allowed its cultural assets to renew themselves in a new era of "community." 

It is an old story but one that is constantly rewritten.  The question is, what will it look like in the 21st century, and how can we best study it?

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Now that ICF has announced its Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year, it is a good time to reflect on "the other 14."  That is, the 14 out of the Smart21 Communities of the Year that were not selected by our analysts to be among the Top Seven.

These stages in the competition are my least favorite part of our yearly process.  So much innovation, inspiration and hard work are on display from October to January, only to be pushed out of the limelight by the Top Seven selection.  It's true that the Top Seven scored higher on our Intelligent Community Indicators, and on the annual theme of the Awards, than the other 14.  But those 14 deserve to be honored.  More important, the rest of us need to know about the strategies and practices that put them on the short-list of the world's most successful Intelligent Communities.

Three of our Smart21 - Danville and Bristol in the state of Virginia, USA, and Porto Alegre in Brazil - illustrate a really successful strategy for community broadband, one that has put them square at the center of growing regional economies. 

When local governments go into telecommunications, they have different priorities than do private companies. They need to deliver dependable, high-quality, cost-effective service, and to make money doing it, because otherwise there's nothing to invest in maintenance and growth.  (For all those who like to chant "people, not profits," I offer the wisdom of management consultant Peter Drucker, who pointed out that, contrary to popular belief, businesses do not exist to make profits; it's just that they just can't do anything else unless they do.)  But governments have other goals that are part of their special mission: economic development, improved public services, more equal access to opportunity.  Sometimes the pursuit of those goals distracts them from running the store properly, in which case they lose money and make voters angry.  But that's certainly not the case with Porto Alegre, Danville or Bristol. 

All three communities were starved for both broadband and economic opportunity.  They are in rural areas and long depended on agriculture and low-skilled manufacturing for employment. Not a recipe for economic success in the 21st Century.  The incumbent telephone or cable TV providers were not willing to make the investments needed to create a robust level of service.  So, all three communities decided to do something about it themselves. 

In Bristol and Danville, the cities owned their own electric utilities, and made these the basis for the build-out of a 100 Mbps fiber-optic network.  In Porto Alegre, a city-owned communications and IT company built a hybrid fiber and wireless network.  The original concept was to serve city-owned facilities as a substitute for paying the incumbent telephone carrier for service.  In other words, to save the taxpayers money.  But demand from businesses and citizens caused all three communities to aim higher.  Bristol fought in the courts and state legislature for 3 years, at a cost of US$2.5m, to win the right to compete with incumbents - and within a few years had over 60% of the market.  In Danville, community leaders were able to sidestep legal battles by making theirs an open-access network, in which the city provided the physical infrastructure that private-sector carriers used to deliver voice, Internet and video services.  Because of a different legal and political climate, Porto Alegre reported no major obstacles to its deployment of both infrastructure and services.

So far, these are community network stories like many others.  It was after the networks were up and running that things got interesting.  Bristol Virginia Utilities (BVU), the city-owned carrier, developed partnerships with neighboring counties, and became the prime contractor for a network build-out there funded in part by public grants.  The networks linked not only to homes and businesses, but also to a new technology park that attracted major IT employers.  In Danville, the city-owned electric utility services the entire region, and the third phase of the nDanville network is reaching outside the city limits to more than 20,000 rural businesses and homes.  It will support telework, rural schools and local business start-ups.  Porto Alegre is using their 350km regional fiber ring to connect rural health clinics with hospitals downtown.  That has reduced waiting time at the clinics from 4 months to 30 days, and missed appointments from 40% to less than 10% of the total. 

What's the point?  Each of these communities has leveraged its own hunger for broadband to make itself the hub of a fiber-connected region.  As Mayor Jim Rector of Bristol told me, BVU is generating income from places far outside the city.  The network is making possible high-quality jobs to which Bristol residents commute.  It has encouraged the state university system to build a satellite campus nearby - connected, of course, to the fiber network.  Senior executives of a Fortune 500 mining company headquartered in Bristol told me that they couldn't keep their corporate nerve center where it was without the connectivity provided by BVU.  Broadband-based services flow outward from the hub and prosperity flows back in, only to flood outward again like a spring tide. 

If your community has its own broadband network, you probably have opportunities to grow it beyond your own boundaries.  In fact, neighboring communities and counties may be clamoring for your help.  Should you give it?  The experience of the Smart21 suggests you should.  You have to get the funding and business model right, of course, but the rewards to the network owner and operator can be substantial.  And while you are building traffic on your network and incomes in your community, you will be doing a lot of good for your neighbors as well.

The 10 Best Ideas from the Other 14 -  Part 2

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My grandmother used to say that "idle hands are the Devil's playthings."  She meant that when you don't know what to do with yourself, that's when you are most likely to get into trouble.  I guess the lesson stuck with me.  On the rare occasions when I am exposed to reality TV, my first reaction is always the same.  "Those people have way too much time on their hands."

On February 12, Sam Dillon of The New York Times published a story that shows what a smart woman my grandmother was.  The article ("Wi-Fi Turns Rowdy Bus Into Rolling Study Hall") reported on the miracle that occurred when school buses in the town of Vail, Arizona were equipped with WiFi hubs.  Instead of teasing, texting, flirting, shouting at, climbing over or punching each other, the kids turned to the Web for entertainment, communication and help with last-minute homework.  As Mr. Dillon put it, "Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared." 

The story shows a local government making creative use of broadband to influence the behavior of its citizens for the good of the community.  Going to school?  Good.  Getting into trouble because long bus rides are boring?  Bad.  Catching up on homework and practicing digital skills instead?  Good. 

As I read it, I was thinking of our Smart21 of 2010.  I realized that smart communities around the world are doing a lot more than just deploying broadband.  They are thinking through how broadband deployment can also be a policy tool.  By applying creativity to the "how" and "where" of broadband deployment, they are multiplying the positive impacts on community life and economic performance.     

Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada is a small city of 65,000.  If you jump in your car, no part of the city is more than 15 or 20 minutes away.  That makes it a tough place to run a municipal bus line, because travel by car will always be more convenient.  At least it was until Moncton decided to change the equation.  The city partnered with a local company, Red Ball Internet, to install Wi-Fi hubs on all city buses, linked to the Web at up to 45 Mbps.  I have watched full-motion video online (see photo) while traveling on a Moncton bus, and the performance in this demanding application was as good as I get at home.  Suddenly, the idea of commuting by bus looks a lot more appealing.  Instead of staring at the cars ahead of me in traffic, I can use the time to get a head start on my work or finish something left over from the day without leaving late.  Moncton credits Wi-Fi with boosting ridership.  That's important for two reasons.  Moncton is growing and traffic congestion could become a real problem, as it is in Silicon Valley, where it hurts quality of life and raises costs.  Putting more people on buses also keeps Moncton's carbon footprint under control as its economy continued to prosper.   

Taoyuan County, Taiwan is home to the international airport that serves the nearby capital city of Taipei.   The airport is an important economic center for the county.  But the blessing is decidedly mixed.  Think about what you do when you fly into an airport located outside the city of your destination.  At my regular hub - Liberty International Airport in Newark, New Jersey - I get off the plane and head east for my office in New York City or north for home.  That's money leaving Newark, leaving Essex County, and going out of reach.

Taoyuan's answer is a plan called Aerotropolis, whose goal is to keep more of the airport's economic output within the county.  An important part of the plan is "M-Taoyuan," a WiMAX corridor it is building to improve connectivity across some pretty mountainous terrain.  But here's the real point.  When it is completed, it will form a seamless wireless broadband corridor connecting every traveler on every kilometer between the airport and downtown Taipei.  Like a physical highway that allows prosperity to flow out of major cities as well as inward, M-Taoyuan will transform that corridor into an entirely new economic center. 

When communities deploy wireless, they often look for the easy victory. They put wireless antennas on light poles in the city parks and celebrate.  Hey look!  We've got a brand new Wi-Fi Zone!  But let me ask you: when was the last time you went to the park to check your email?  When I go for a walk in the park near my office, it is to get away from email and instant messages and telephone calls, to feel the breeze and get some sun on my face. 

When communities go into broadband or develop policies to guide the private sector, it's an important chance to think about what users need and what social and economic goals they want to accomplish.  "Connectivity for all" is a good slogan,  but it's not enough to make communities successful in the 21st Century.