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.

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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. 

Recently, we announced our 2010 Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year.  They were selected by an international academic team of analysts from among the Smart21 Communities we named in October.  As always, some of my personal favorites did not make the list, and I failed to appreciate fully the strengths of some that did.

But there was one trend I did notice.  It was a focus on entrepreneurship: creating and growing new businesses.  Every one of this year's Top Seven Intelligent Communities based their economic success on creating the right environment for the start-up of small, fast-growing companies and on nurturing their progress in ways large and small. 

That turns out to be a smart move.  Last year, Metro Innovation - a venture capital firm in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA - published a brochure called Ideas in Progress.  It would be hard to find a better summary of why promoting entrepreneurship is a major best practice of Intelligent Communities.  Here are just a few of the important questions they answer.  All are based on US economic statistics but I think the conclusions apply anywhere that free enterprise is allowed to flourish.

♦  Where does prosperity come from?  Over the last 20 years, 100% of net job growth in the US can be attributed to companies that are less than five years old.  When the tech bubble burst in 2001, Fortune 500 firms cut more than 900,000 jobs.  In the same year, venture-backed start-ups created 4.3 million jobs and $736 billion in annual revenues.  In 2008, venture-backed companies employed more than 12 million Americans and produced nearly $3 trillion in revenue.  That accounts for 11% of private-sector employment and 21% of US GDP. 

♦  Why is venture capital so important?  Venture capital is early-stage investment in business.  It isn't essential to start-ups - 76% of American companies are financed by the founders themselves and 23% by their friends and family.  In fact, only one start-up in one thousand receives venture capital.  But they do better.  In 2000, venture-backed companies had a failure rate of less than 1%, compared with the 46% failure rate for all start-ups.  One percent compared to forty-six percent.  That sounds like magic, but it's not.  Investors in early-stage companies are very selective: for every 100 business plans they evaluate, on average, they fund only one.  So a company that receives venture financing has been tipped by experts as a likely winner - and still, only 10-15% of them will grow enough to meet their investors' goals. 

♦  Why is Silicon Valley so successful?  It's about clusters, sure.  Business-university collaboration, of course.  But money helps.  On average, the US venture capital industry invests $25 billion every year in start-ups - and 50% of that is invested in the state of California.  This money is raised from sources all across the United States, which means that most American communities are exporting investment to the Golden State.  In 2009, McKinsey & Co. published a "Global Innovation Heat Map" showing centers of innovation around the world.  Guess what region comes out on top.

View the interactive map at McKinsey & Co.

♦  Why does innovation matter?  Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow has the answer.  In a major study, he found that "ingenuity" accounted for 88% of the growth in output per man-hour between 1909 and 1949.  Eighty-eight percent.  Innovation drives the economy because it is the only way to make costs lower while improving quality and usefulness.  It is the only way, in short, to improve our standard of living over time. 

What are the leaders of Intelligent Communities to make of all this?  Simply put, local entrepreneurship is a "must have" in the Broadband Economy.  If it is not taking place within the city line, it had better be going on nearby, so that your citizens can benefit from it.   

To become reliable creators of prosperity, entrepreneurs need risk capital, whether it comes from private, public or nonprofit sources.  The money fuels growth, but even more important is the experience, objectivity and downright ruthlessness that venture investors bring to business.  If a group of seasoned, committed investors is picking winners in your community or one next door, only one out of a hundred may get the cash, but other 99 will raise their game, too.  Creating an entrepreneurial culture, developing funding sources and attracting investors is one of the biggest challenges that Intelligent Communities face.  The good news is that, from the example of this year's Top Seven, they are tackling the challenge with everything they've got. 

I wrote in earlier posts about the Asian Way and the European Way of being an Intelligent Community.  Now it's time to come home and reflect on the North American Way, as illustrated by our Smart21 Communities of the Year. 

The same caveats apply to North American communities as to their Asian and European peers.  All are different from each other, and all share characteristics with communities in other parts of the world.  But they occupy a distinctly North American cultural, political and social environment.  That has shaped their evolution. It has given them something unique to share with the world. 

1.  Eagerness to Experiment.  North America is known as a place where innovation thrives.  It goes back a long way in history.  In his 1835 book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville told about a conversation with an American sailor, in which de Tocqueville complained about the poor quality of American shipbuilding.  The sailor told him that ship design changed so fast that it wasn't worth building ships that would last very long.  They became uncompetitive too quickly. 
 
Innovation thrives because of a willingness, often an eagerness, to experiment.  In the Smart21 Community of Riverside, California, USA, a new city manager experimented with a whole series of changes.  He hired the city's first CIO.  He asked that CIO and the city's Economic Development Department to collaborate on an economic growth agenda.  He tried hiring a "high technology business concierge," and having this single point of contact helped attract and retain high-tech companies.  In another experiment, Riverside installed a small WiFi zone in the city's downtown.  It proved popular, so the city's new CIO started work on a more robust system that would double as the city's first-responder network.   

Arlington County, Virginia displays the same restless energy.  Government, business, institutions and citizens engage in intensive, ongoing collaboration that has been named "The Arlington Way."  This collaboration spawns an apparently endless flow of programs, projects and ideas, from professional internships in the schools to educational programs on the local cable TV network and the Web-based Arlington Teen Portal.  Successful programs endure.  Unsuccessful ones expire.   And the community as a whole moves forward.  

2.  Focus on Job and Wealth Creation.  Lacking the job and income protections common in Europe, North American Intelligent Communities make the creation of jobs and prosperity their top priority.  Many of the 2010 Smart21 offer "comeback" stories.  Windsor in Essex County, Ontario, Canada, is sister city to Detroit in the US.  Its fortunes waxed with those of Motor City, and have waned just as drastically.  With an unemployment rate the highest in Canada, Windsor and Essex County put retraining, job creation and economic diversification at the top of their list, and are pursuing them through an impressive array of programs from broadband deployment to education to investment attraction. 

Danville, Virginia, USA prospered when tobacco was a growth business and the American textile industry was globally competitive.  But by the beginning of the new century, it had Virginia's highest unemployment rate.  The nDanville fiber network was conceived as a means to change the dynamic - to create a knowledge-based economy and transform the city into an entrepreneur's haven. 

3.  Local Solutions in the Absence of National Policies.  While nations in Europe and Asia have long had national broadband strategies, it was only with the coming of the Obama Administration that America got serious about a Federal plan.  By contrast, Canada has been a leader in broadband policy and development projects for more than a decade.  In the US, the lack of national policy was hardly helpful, but it did spawn really innovative local solutions.  The history of rural electrification left many US communities the owners of their own electric and water utilities.  Some, like Bristol, Virginia, turned them into telecommunications carriers - and like Bristol, many spent years in the courtroom fighting incumbents for the right to compete.  Running at a profit, the Bristol Virginia Utilities network now extends into neighboring communities and counties, and has put Bristol at the center of an expanding web of connectivity for regional and national companies.  Dublin, Ohio followed the same path: laying conduit for carriers, then building its own fiber network in partnership with a telecom contractor and interconnecting it with public-sector state and national nets, and finally overlaying a WiFi network on top of it for public use.  Using tax-increment financing, Dublin ensured that the network paid its own way at every step in development.   Because American taxpayers are fierce overseers of every penny of public spending. 

And in some Canadian communities, they have decided that local solutions offer the best return.  Moncton, New Brunswick, relied on its incumbent carrier to help transform a former railroad town into a mecca for call centers.  But as the community's needs grew, it was forced to branch out.  Working with a local company, it installed WiFi in its downtown core, its municipal bus network, sports arena and concert site.  The city will soon expand and diversify that network to bring Moncton's fast-growing businesses the world-class connectivity they need.

The North American Way of being an Intelligent Community seems natural to me, because this is where I make my home.  But beyond that, I find it offers interesting values.  I believe that job and wealth creation belong at the center of the Intelligent Community movement, because it is economic vitality that makes possible everything else we love in our communities - the culture, social connections and quality of life. 

The willingness to try new things and then either scale them up or end them is essential to successful innovation anywhere.  So much so that innovation experts have a name for it: "fast failure."  If it's going to work, find out fast.  And if it's not going to work, find that out fast, too. 

And finally, I just like the scale of local solutions.  They are something you can pursue and hope to see results in your lifetime.  And that's true no matter where the community is.  During the last Building the Broadband Economy summit in New York, I spoke with Vice Mayor Ulf Kristersson of Stockholm, which was named the Intelligent Community of the Year.  He talked about his previous career in Sweden's Parliament and his decision to return to local politics.  "It was interesting being a legislator," he said, "and working on national policies.  But I prefer working in local government, because you know you are making a difference."

Is there a distinctly European way to be an Intelligent Community?  In my last post, I took the risk of describing three characteristics of Asian Intelligent Communities.  I did it knowing full well that the Intelligent Communities of Asia are more different than they are alike, and that many communities outside Asia share some of their attributes.  The same is certainly true of Intelligent Communities in Europe.  But the similarities are still striking and have something to teach us all.

1.  Multi-Level Leadership by Government.  Western Europe is home to the welfare state, which actively intervenes in social, business and civic life.  In today's Europe, however, the "state" has many levels.  Policies and funding flow from the European Commission to member states and then, in the form of both programs and grants, to municipalities.  Rare is the European Intelligent Community whose programs fail to integrate with national plans and pay homage to European policies.   

Trikala, Greece, a 2010 Smart Community, has mastered the difficult art of leading while at the same time remaining comfortably integrated with national and European priorities.  With the help of European Union funding, Trikala built a metropolitan network and launched numerous e-government and digital inclusion programs.  On the strength of these achievements, the Greek Ministry of Economics named Trikala the first Digital City in Greece.  This opened up additional funding for research, urban and regional development from the EC and national government. 

Tallinn, Estonia, another 2010 Smart21, has benefited enormously from national programs.  In 1999, the government sold 49% of its state-owned telecom carrier to foreign companies.  A Telecommunications Act, Digital Signature Act and Public Information Act were passed in quick succession to create the conditions for growth in all forms of telecom.  The government launched a "Tiger Leap" program to put PCs in schools and triggered a wave of IT and network investment fueled by NGOs.  These actions put the wind under the wings of Tallinn's own Intelligent Community programs.  The result was a surge of local growth and one of the most Internet-savvy populations on the Continent.

2.  Focus on Social, Civil and Cultural Priorities.  Welfare states spend heavily on services that foster social progress and individual well-being, from health and pension systems to education and environmental sustainability.   ICF's 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year, Stockholm, will be the European Green Capital in 2010.  And Europe is surely the only place where cities take turns serving as Cultural Capitals.  Tallinn will be one in 2011. 

When European cities invest in becoming Intelligent Communities, they carry these priorities into the digital realm.  Besançon, France was named a "Ville Internet @@@@@" (Internet City) by the French government in 2008.  Not only because it built one of the first metro fiber networks in the country but for applying information and communications technology to improve urban living, culture and education, social life, citizenship and business.  One of its many projects, the Digital Schoolbag, grants every student a free laptop with educational software, a discount broadband subscription and computer workshops for adults.  At a significant cost, Besançon is trying to erase the digital divide for future generations.

3.  A Bias for Publicly-Owned Fiber.  Government ownership of utilities, railroads, airlines and other infrastructure is a tradition in Europe.  Anyone who has ridden trains on the Continent knows that quality of service is the first consideration with cost a distance second.  So it is with broadband.  Alone and in partnership with business, European Intelligent Communities build broadband networks with a marked preference for the high speeds provided by optical fiber.   In the UK, the 3i group is collaborating with Dundee, Scotland to lay fiber-optic cable throughout the city sewer network; in 2010, 40% of homes and businesses will be passed by fiber offering 100 Mbps connectivity.  Eindhoven, Netherlands is the site of multiple fiber deployments, from the nationally-funded Kenniswijk pilot project (15,000 homes) to the Nuenen co-op (7,500 homes), and major deployments by Reggefiber (230,000 homes).  One of the latest projects of Eindhoven's Brainport public-private partnership is the Eindhoven Fiber eXchange Foundation (EFX).  This nonprofit seeks to interlink local, regional and outside networks to manage capacity and interconnections, with the modest goal of making Eindhoven the "ultimate broadband region."

There is much to like about the European Way of being an Intelligent Community.  Because Europeans are comfortable with big government, they put a lot of emphasis on setting policies.  Once the policies are agreed, all those layers of government can throw huge resources at building networks and funding programs.  Those policies measure the well-being of the community as much by health, safety, social progress and cultural vibrancy as by job and wealth creation.  On the other hand, there is also a lot of bureaucracy.  In the European Union countries, because so many decisions are reached by consensus, there can be a lot of compromises that lead to muddle.  And the flow of cash that accompanies European and national priorities sends some communities chasing whatever program is being funded rather than creating sensible strategies to tackle their problems.  At worst, the European Way makes passivity profitable as communities wait for directives and money to arrive from above before taking action.  At best, national and European policies and funding energize local ambitions and empower Intelligent Communities to amazing achievement.

During the Ideas interview, John Jung and I discussed the criteria used by ICF to identify and name an intelligent community.  We noted, familiarly, how policies, businesses and social life are being shaped around an emerging broadband economy.  From an empirical perspective, the body of knowledge within ICF has grown substantially enough for us to claim that there are repetitive processes and steps that can be taken to launch a community into the 21st Century.

Most of this has become standard stuff for us, and we will continue to move it further along in 2010 as we gather more data, invite communities to host ICF institutes around the world and share profiles from our new Top Seven communities - and dozens of others through our Workshop and Accelerator programs - which each represent best practices.

However, near the end of the interview with the Ideas editors (which I am afraid is only available in Taiwanese) I was prompted by a good question from Fabius Chin, one of the interviewers along with editor-in-chief Lillian Kim.  I began talking about the creation of the community which has in it the hearty fabric of something invisible, yet will assure a community of longevity through the generations.  I referred to aspects of our criteria which have less to do, overtly, with the presence of a broadband infrastructure and more to do with a form of human capital that has been present for centuries and is only now being considered in a new light by people like Mel Horwitch of the Polytechnic Institute of NY University, Canada's Martin Institute, to some degree, and others.

Rather than focusing on the more technical aspects of broadband, I am increasingly using vocabulary that is associated with the artistic community, sociologists, urban planners and theologians.  I referred to a theme which has been ignored by interviewers in Asia, "creative culture," but which will be the essence, or the raw materials, for the "new economy."  Industrial policy is great, but intellectual policy is greater, I said.  I waited for their polite silence but I did not get it.  Either my interviewers were being extremely polite, or the concept resonates with increased vibrancy in a part of the world which most associate with stuff bought at Walmart rather than as a place where there are increasingly clusters of exciting, reborn, creative cultures.

I am increasingly aware of the cultural component of intelligent communities, which is ultimately a reflection of the creativity inherent in every person.  The question for communities is how to "mine" this material in a way that will enable economic success and an enrichment of a type that may not have existed for generations.   With "The Education 'Last Mile'," which explores the new but inherent relationship between the educations system and the workforce, as our sixth criteria this year, we have decided to give communities the opportunity to dig deeper and to explore for us ways in which learning and work are connected.  I suspect we will begin to see how creative cultures are making the transition from an industrial or even agrarian model of education toward one that is far less linear, and incorporative of deeper intellectual and intuitive processes.

This will allow us to further the dialogue with teachers and academicians, as well as the one we have been having with leaders of communities, CIOs, tech companies and other who gather around ICF's global dialogue.

Part two of my "Year Ahead" blog will be available next week.  In the meantime, I wish you and your community a healthy and prosperous year ahead.

Chongquin is a city-region that boasts 56 universities, massive science and technology parks with research centers such as Haifu, investigating non-invasive technologies to deal with cancer via ultrasound; massive multimedia digital projects and broadband-based outsourcing and data centers. The urban intensity of Chongquin is every bit like Manhattan and its skyline at times can be mistaken for Hong Kong.

No one that I know back home in North America has ever heard of it. Yet, here I was on business to this incredible city and its neighbors in the southwest of China, talking about intelligent cities to civic leaders and finding great interest by everyone I spoke to about becoming one. Their voracious appetite to become part of the world stage gave me the opportunity to raise the idea of becoming an Intelligent Community with the mayors, the head of the region's foreign affairs and the heads of some of the area universities. People were clearly interested but as one of the mayors said, "we do not have the confidence to be an intelligent community."

Confidence, now there is an attribute that I had not thought about. We have criteria ranging from broadband infrastructure, knowledge work, creativity and innovation, digital inclusion and marketing and advocacy, but we never discussed confidence. Here is a city that has all the markings of an intelligent city, and they would dearly love to be considered one, but they lack confidence.

Clearly by size alone these cities should have all the attributes to become intelligent cities. Massive consumer and business acumen; major transit facilities; research and data centers with significant double-digit gigabyte broadband services; and a culture of use of advanced technologies. Cell phones abound in these parts, even among some of the poor but entrepreneurial market vendors and street hawkers. Smart notebooks sit on the tables at Starbucks and other local hotspots. No wonder, a major partnership of HP and Taiwan's Foxconn are pumping out large quantities of laptops and notebooks from the nearby industrial park.

And yet they lack confidence. Judging from the wave of enthusiasm on the streets and in the lecture halls, I am sure that that will soon change.

It is usually a bad idea to generalize about big regions of the world, and never more so than in Asia.  A much-traveled business person once told me that there is no such thing.  The region is made up of many different countries with their own unique histories, and businesses typically fail when they try to attack it as one big market.  What works in India is meaningless in Australia, and what South Koreans want could not be more different from what Indonesians desire. 

But the temptation is just too strong.  As we prepare for the announcement of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year on January 20, I am going back over the first wave of nomination forms submitted by the Smart21 Communities in October.  From a review of the five Asian communities among the Smart21, I want to risk some generalizations about the Asian Way of being an Intelligent Community.  I offer them with all due humility.  The communities are more different than alike.  What they have in common is not uniquely Asian but can be found to some degree in communities everywhere.  In the Asian Smart21 Communities, however, we find distilled a set of particular strengths, from which we all can learn.

1.  Mighty visions and massive plans.  It is common among Asian Intelligent Communities to develop ambitious visions and to back them up with meticulous planning.  Taoyuan County, Taiwan is home to the nation's biggest airport, which serves the capital, Taipei.  The county's vision is to transform that asset into an Aerotropolis, an information-driven ecosystem for trade, industry, exhibitions, tourism and entertainment.  Driving the transformation is an ICT revolution in four stages: E-Taoyuan (for e-government), M-Taoyuan (for mobile broadband services), U-Taoyuan (for ubiquitous ICT in business and life) and I-Taoyuan (which ties to President Ma's vision of making Taiwan an Intelligent Island.)
     Taoyuan is a county of 2 million people that is Taiwan's industrial heartland.  But the same emphasis on vision and planning is visible in Gold Coast City, Australia, a county-size municipality that is home to a half million residents and attracts more than 10 million tourists yearly.    Fifteen years ago, the City put into place a formal economic development strategy overseen by a Regional Economic Advisory Committee.  The plan is updated annually to align it with other community development plans, such as the Gold Coast Planning Scheme, Local Growth Management Strategy, Activity Centre Strategy and Pacific Innovation Corridor program - not to mention the Bold Future blueprint for the next three decades.  That is a lot of plans and schemes and blueprints.  By the standards of other parts of the world, it may seem like overkill.  But consistency, discipline and focus are powerful virtues, and these communities seem to have them in abundance.

2.  Large-scale public and private investment.  Asian communities tend to make big bets on physical infrastructure, from building complexes to fiber networks.  Suwon City in South Korea has its own big vision (U-Happy) and multi-step meticulous plan.  But construction has a big role: the Gwanggyo Housing Development District, which houses 150 high-tech companies; the Suwon Industrial Complexes, with 1.2 million square meters of factory lands; the Suwon Venture Center for high-tech start-ups, the Gyeonggy Regional Research Center, Content Convergence Software Research Center and Auto Part & Material Research Center.  The government leads as planner and investor, and businesses and universities pick up the rest.  Nobody appears interested in a quick profit: they are laying the foundation for decades of growth.
     In Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, the focus is on the University of Ballarat Technology Park, which is key to a plan to make the city of 90,000 an internationally recognized ICT center.  Public, private and university money have gone into infrastructure, business attraction, incubation and training.  Meanwhile, the government of Australia is rolling out an A$43 billion National Broadband Network offering up to 100 Mbps nationwide.  Vendors have lined up to profit from the wave of investment, but it is the people of communities like Ballarat that will see the greatest return in coming decades.  Putting up buildings alone does not create sustainable growth - just ask the US construction industry right now.  But properly integrated into a long-term strategy, it can have a transformative impact. 

3.  Focus on education.  The Confucian cultures of Asia are famous for their devotion to learning, and education figures prominently in the economic development strategies of Asia's Intelligent Communities.  None is more focused than the Employment Services Card system of the Tianjin Binhai New Area, home to 2 million people in Tianjin, China.  Starting at university, the card records student participation in career guidance and internships.  It qualifies students for entrepreneurship training and mentoring, business subsidies, loans, social insurance subsidies and other schemes.  The government pays 70% of the minimum wage for between 3 and 12 months after hiring and has set up a technology transfer center to connect universities and businesses.  Inter-disciplinary teams of professors and students have solved many technical problems for businesses in the New Area, from grape cultivation and winemaking to wastewater treatment in papermaking. 

All of the Asian Smart21 put education, from primary through the "last mile" to employment, at the center of their efforts.  That's not unique to Asia, any more than planning and investment.  But the seriousness with which the Asian Smart21 pursue these things is worthy of being celebrated - and imitated - around the world.

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I just finished reading a report on the future of science parks.  The title, "Future Knowledge Ecosystems," is a real snooze but the report actually has a lot to say to communities everywhere.  It presents possible futures for science parks, those custom-built clusters housing scientific and technical research organizations - and hopefully spinning out lots of start-up companies.  The authors are worried that science parks are in decline, whether they are Krista Science City in Stockholm or a three-story building in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.  In the most dramatic of three scenarios, they paint a picture of a future in which a "research cloud" of small, cheap, nimble groups connected online becomes the favored way of doing research.  This deals a terrible blow to science parks and the universities that host them. 

Here's why the report matters.  It captures a worry that is universal.  Manufacturing hubs from Eindhoven in Holland to Northeast Ohio, USA fret about losing their competitive edge to nimble, low-cost manufacturers in Asia.  Small cities and towns from Bristol, Virginia USA to Ballarat, Australia fear that they will dry up and blow away as youth leave for greater opportunity elsewhere.  Even financial capitals from New York City to Hong Kong worry as more transactions move online, empowering smaller financial centers at their expense.

We are all worrying about the same thing: in the broadband economy, does location matter?  Of course, we know that for some things it always will.  If we are extracting raw materials from the earth, Mother Nature decides where we do it.  We will always need to transport people and things - whether raw materials, fuels, foodstuffs or goods - and communities benefit from being on the transport network or, best of all, a place where networks converge.  But as economies mature, a rising share of employment comes from selling intangible things.  In 2007, the OECD reported that that nearly three-quarters of employees in the richest 30 nations worked in services.  And in many developing nations, the export of services grew a lot faster during the last boom than did the export of goods. 

In advanced economies woven together by a broadband "cloud," location matters a lot less.  Brick-and-mortar retailers compete with e-tailers.  The owners of office buildings, not to mention jetliners and hotels, compete with telepresence.  Employers that historically needed to be in a particular city or district suddenly find that they no longer need to, because their workforce and suppliers are scattered and mobile.  I see it every day in New York's financial district, once wall-to-wall brokerages and banks, and now increasingly a mixed-use residential and business neighborhood. 

That's troubling news for communities.  If investment, jobs and trade can go anywhere, why should they come to you?  If it matter less in economic terms where people are, what will keep them at home?

I write a lot about economic forces, because I believe they color how we think, what we do and what we say in ways we seldom realize.  But we are far more than just economic actors.  Location still matters because, in our deepest core, we need it to matter.  We need to belong somewhere, in relationship with people we know and trust, in order to know who we are.  Communities will always matter because they are where we feed our spirits.  And since we are going to live in communities together, we are going to find ways to generate economic growth together. 

But I do think that "communities in the cloud" will have to rethink what makes them communities.  We like to define who we are by insisting that we are better than somebody else.  We may have our problems, but at least we're not those other guys.  You know the ones I mean: the people in the next town or next country, the ones who look different, who believe different things, who follow customs we don't understand.  We may have our problems, but we stand head and shoulders above those shady, deceitful bags of scum. 

That isn't going to cut it in the broadband economy.  The way for communities to win is use the power of broadband to invite the world in.  We need to learn to define ourselves, not by who we are not, but by who we can connect with.  I have visited many small communities that are located in "the middle of nowhere."  I believe that "the middle of nowhere" is fast becoming just a state of mind.  If your community has robust broadband and people who know how to use it, you are not in the middle of nowhere, you are in the middle of the world. 

"Future Knowledge Ecosystems: The Next Twenty Years of Technology-Led Economic Development, by Anthony Townsend, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and Rick Weddle.  The Institute for the Future, The Research Triangle Park Foundation and the International Association of Science Parks.  Published June 2009 by the Institute for the Future (www.itif.org)

Something interesting is happening in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. 

Cleveland is home to world-class universities and the Cleveland Clinic, one of America's most innovative hospitals.  In 2006, we named Cleveland as one of our Top Seven Intelligent Communities, and we honored it again in 2008 among the four cities that make up Northeast Ohio.  

But Cleveland also has the second highest poverty rate among US cities, just behind the automotive capital of Detroit.  Half a century ago, it was one of the engines of America's industrial prosperity.  John D. Rockefeller made his first fortune there.  But when American manufacturing lost its competitive edge in the Seventies and Eighties, the economy went south.  The descendents of that generation of entrepreneurs took their inheritances and moved to the suburbs.  Despite the hard work of a lot of people since then, the city still suffers.   

One of those people is Lev Gonick, CIO of Case Western Reserve University.  When I was in Cleveland in March 2008, Lev told me about a project he was working on.  Like many urban universities, Case Western is in a tough neighborhood.  As many as three out of five of the university's neighbors are on food stamps, the American food security program. Eighty percent of newborn children in the surrounding neighborhoods are enrolled in Medicaid, the health program for the poor.   In the current recession, mortgage foreclosures in the area are as high as one out every three households.  It is a place where poverty, ignorance and failure are the inheritance that is handed down from parents to children.

Lev's project launched in mid-November, shortly before the US Thanksgiving holiday.  The university is connecting 100 neighboring households to its gigabit fiber network.  University researchers, technologists and institutions in the region are collaborating to see if high-bandwidth online services can actually reduce violence and crime, increase graduation rates in science and math, and do a better job of identifying and monitoring chronic health problems.  Case Western students will be working with the households to identify their needs, train people to join the digital world, and study how they actually do.  There's an eye-opening idea for you: as part of its core curriculum, a major university will study how broadband can be used to address the most intractable social problems of urban America.  The best minds in medicine, public health, education and public safety will put the 100 households under the microscope to learn what works and what does not.   Eventually, the University Circle Innovation Zone, as the project is called, hopes to connect more than 25,000 residents. 

You can read what Lev has to say about the project on our Web site.  It's a fantastic example of innovation in broadband that also contributes directly to the educational excellence needed to create a knowledge-based workforce.  And for me, it was one more thing to put on the list of blessings received when I sat down to a turkey dinner on America's national day of gratitude.  Thanks, Lev, and the best of luck to you and all of the people and institutions involved.  The work you are doing may well change the world for the better.

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Innovation is a global issue.  In a new poll released by Newsweek and Intel, 75% of Americans say that technology innovation is more important than ever but over half fear that the Great Recession has hurt the ability of US companies to innovate.  Europeans largely believe that technology innovation has improved their quality of life and the economy, yet only 14% predict that Europe will be an innovation leader.  Not so the Chinese: 63% believe that China will overtake the US in technology innovation within 30 years.

Innovation may be global, but it always takes place in a local context, be it a town or city, a county, state or province.  Here's an example.  This past week, in the US state of Nebraska, the University of Nebraska's Board of Regents took up an issue raised by opponents of stem cell research, which holds such promise for developing innovative new therapies but does it by making use of embryonic tissue.  For weeks, the board had been the target of a fierce campaign from opponents.  Their goal was to have the board restrict research to a small number of cell lines approved by President George W. Bush, rather than opening the door to research on hundreds created since 2001 from unused embryos at fertility clinics.  In the end, the board deadlocked in a tie vote, which left the current rules in place and was a defeat for the activists.

The morning I read that story, I stopped on my way to work to stare at a huge banner draped across the front of the New York Stock Exchange (see the video below).  The China Cord Blood Corporation was doing a public offering.  I heard later that they raised about $20m to fund expansion in China.  Its business is storing the blood left in umbilical cords after birth.  Why?  Because such blood may be a pathway to innovative new therapies in the future. 

And there you had it: two stories of healthcare innovation tying together opposite ends of the globe.  A Chinese company with a successful business coming to the US to raise money, and a US university caught in a struggle with citizens about whether one form of innovation was morally right.  Whatever your position on the issue in Nebraska, it's clear that local context matters.  Broad cultural issues and plain old people with strong feelings can have outsized impacts on a community's innovation potential.  In Saudi Arabia, religious opposition is rising to modern universities created by the kingdom to jumpstart innovation - because they are places where Westerners and Saudis can live a Western lifestyle.  In the US state of California, huge budget cuts are threatening that crown jewel of higher education, the University of California system.  The current cause is the recession but the underlying problem is a law drafted by anti-tax activists back in the Eighties that has made it almost impossible for the state to raise taxes for the past two decades. 

In this global broadband economy, communities have local choices to make.  Innovation is essential, yet it can be deeply disturbing to established ways of life, thought and belief.  It can be tempting to say "we just can't do that here" because a noisy minority opposes it.  But they can't stop innovation from taking place.  They can just ensure that your community misses out on the benefits.

At the start of the 20th century, only about 10% of humanity lived in cities.  Today, over 50% live in urban environments. By the middle of the 21st century, the number could be as high as 70%. For that reason, making cities smarter may well be the key to the survival of the human race. Our book, Future Cities, examines ways, in the words of Star Trek, to "make it so."

It is in cities that new technologies and major scientific discoveries and inventions arise. It is here that new strategies for sustainable development, renewable energy, and combating climate change ferment and blossom. In Future Cities, you can read about the major forces of urban change that will ultimately reshape our world.

The interrelationship between the city, the evolution of humanity and new technology is powerful.  Clearly the future of cities has many dimensions related to art, culture, education, health care, business opportunity, trade, political relationships, governmental and military systems and much, much more. Nevertheless communications and information technology (IT) are incredibly powerful drivers of change.  In the United States, cities such as Philadelphia are using smart recycling bins embedded with RFID tags to track and encourage residents for recycling. In recent months, the government of Kenya successfully designed and implemented an elaborate e-learning program, which trained over 22,000 nurses in the basic medical skills necessary to treat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.

In China, there is world's largest electronic education program known as the Chinese National TV University, which I helped to start in 1986 as an Intelsat-based satellite experiment under Project Share. This system now provides innovative programming to over 10 million students. In Korea, transportation managers have deployed a network of wireless sensors to ensure the safety of bridges throughout the country. 

In Stockholm, a city I had the privilege to visit when the International Space University met there over a decade ago, its city planners have been using information technology in a broad range of ways that led to its selection as the current Intelligent Community of the Year.  These are only a few examples of how technology is redefining our world.

As I said when I gave the Arthur C. Clarke Lecture in 2001 in Washington, D.C., the 21st century will be the most challenging century in the entire history of humankind. More people have had to find a way to live and survive on planet Earth since the start of World War I than in the entire history from the time that marked the start of the human race. With each decade, the challenges only seem to escalate.

Consider this thought experiment.  If we to take the millions of years since the origins of the first "apeman" and compress that time into a single "SuperMonth" we would find that for 29 days and 22 and half hours we were hunter/gatherer nomads. In the last hour and a half of our SuperMonth, we took up farming, agriculture and building permanent settlements. Only the last 90 minutes represents the age of human towns and cities. Four minutes to midnight represents in SuperMonth time the Renaissance. The last two minutes were the industrial revolution and the last 25 seconds or so is the time represented by computers, television, space missions, lasers, atomic energy - and spandex.

We live in a time of future compression driven by technology. Some of the great challenges of the 21st century--a brief flash of cosmic time--could well see us Homo Sapiens coping with a global population of 12 billion people; adjusting to large-scale technological unemployment triggered by what I call "super automation;" and the real biggie, climate change. All of these problems are, of course, intensively interrelated. It is within the Future City that we can hope to find solutions to these challenges.

Dr. Joseph Pelton is the award-winning author of over 25 books related to the future, applied space systems and communications networks.  His books explore not only how technical systems work, but how they impact society. He is the Former Dean of the International Space University and former head of Strategic Policy at Intelsat.

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It was way back in 590 AD that Pope Gregory the First made the list of human frailties we know today as the Seven Deadly Sins.  These are not the big sins covered by the Talmud's Ten Commandments: thou shalt not this and thou shalt not that.   They are psychological excesses: extravagance, greed, wrath, pride and so on.  My own personal favorite is envy.  It's so universal - where would a consumer culture be without it? - so socially acceptable and so corrosive. If a day goes by when I haven't envied somebody for something, well, I'm just not living. 

We now have evidence that the Seven Deadly Sins are going to follow us into the digital future.  A recent study by Brandchoices.co.uk found that 6 out of 10 Brits admit they would be jealous if they found out that their neighbors had a faster broadband connection than they did. I get it.  At home, I'm suffering with a cable modem delivering maybe 4 Mbps downstream on a good day. If you have a 20 Meg fiber connection, I'm going to curse the ground you walk on. 

But really, envy isn't as much fun as it looks.  It feels bad, for one thing.  It also blinds us to the very real gifts that life has put into our hands.  And it keeps us from taking action to make things better.  It's so much more comfortable to just sit and stew in envy than to do something new and different.   This has been driven home to me by recent work with the Intelligent Communities we have honored through our award program.  I have written a series of what we call Report Cards.  Intelligent Communities ask for them to get feedback on how they scored in our award program's analysis, which gets increasingly rigorous as they advance from Smart21 to Top Seven to Intelligent Community of the Year.  Naturally, we don't reveal how other communities scored - but we do show them where their strengths and weaknesses are, so that they know where to focus in their nomination the following year.  And as I always remind people, it's not really about the nomination or the award.  It's about broadband and knowledge work, digital inclusion and innovation and advocacy in your community.  Knowing your real strengths and weaknesses is just the first step toward making the economic and social progress your citizens deserve. 

I am just wrapping up a Report Card for Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada.  And here's the point: Moncton made the Top Seven last year and really wanted to be our 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year.  The honor went to Stockholm instead.  Moncton's first response was to ask for a Report Card to help them understand why.  When they were named to our Smart21 Communities of 2010, they asked for another Report Card to understand the new competitive environment.  Now, I was not given a magic crystal that lets me see into the hearts of men and women.  For all I know, they may be suffering from all of the Seven Deadly Sins up there in Atlantic Canada.  But they are taking action.  They are seizing their opportunities with both hands, looking their strengths and weaknesses straight in the eye, and deciding what to do about them.  That's smart.  That's the spirit we see in all of the communities we honor in our awards.  And it may just be the single most important competitive advantage they have. 

Dakota Future is a countywide economic development corporation in Dakota County, Minnestoa on the southern edge of the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area.  Within the county, we have more than a dozen communities, six chambers of commerce, a county community development agency, three workforce centers and assorted public and private colleges. Our prime organizational question is how a small membership organization, with leaders from business, education and government, can find its niche and stimulate enhanced economic competitiveness?

Educating the Dakota Future board on Intelligent Communities was the first requirement.  I did some presentations and we borrowed some of Robert Bell's time when he was in town for another conference.  Our board chair bought and distributed multiple copies of the Broadband Economies book - a quick but informative read containing many treasures in its storytelling of Intelligent Community.

As the Dakota Future board of directors learned more about the Intelligent Community approach, they became convinced of two things - that the approach was valid for Dakota County and that Dakota Future was the only entity positioned to organize this countywide initiative.  The Intelligent Community movement focuses growing the economic pie rather than competing for small slices.   This approach fits perfectly into our multi-organization environment.  Our board set a goal to achieve Top Seven by 2012.  Of course, it was easy to set the goal - you just have to say it!  But how do you achieve it?

The Community Accelerator was the perfect program at the right time for us.  We had to know where we stood in comparison to the past winners to know how real our goal was. Completing the benchmarking questionnaire required us to gather the data and our stories on the five Indicators.  It required us to reach out to our stakeholder organizations to find leads on the best practices happening around our county of almost 400,000 people.  It offered an opportunity for low-risk participation for people with limited time and plenty of skepticism.  This approach yielded some very interesting stories new to many established community leaders.

While completing the benchmarking questionnaire, we begin preparing for the ICF visit.  Robert Bell was coming to town and we needed people to be there to meet him.  We planned a meeting with the Dakota Future board at the new countywide 911 public safety center, a press interview, a tour of a beautiful data center and community television studio, a reception and a dinner.  We planned a community workshop where the benchmarking results would be presented. Ensuring that people, the right people, would attend was critical to our success.  This involved phone calls, personally addressed invitations, more phone calls, presentations to city councils and the county board and more phone calls.

We were pleasantly surprised when we received the draft Accelerator report.  It became clear that our Top Seven by 2012 goal was within the realm of possibility.  We had some strengths and some weaknesses, but we were definitely in the game.  As the results were released at our community workshop, peoples' heads were nodding and faces smiling at the positive results.  Looks of concern emerged over our weaker scores.   As we broke into work groups, there was definitely a shared sense of "Let's get this done!"  The buy-in we sought was beginning to take shape. 

Reinforced by third-party verification of our competitive standing, our teams set to work to create goals, inventory assets and develop strategies.  Recruiting additional talent was high on the to-do list of each group.  These teams have initially committed to work over the next six months on the five elements.  Our leadership team is in place to steer and coordinate our application for 2011, to be submitted in September 2010.

When I saw notice of our 2010 Smart 21 status through the Blandin on Broadband blog, I could not believe my eyes.  Our finely tuned work plan to direct our efforts over the next six months was turned on its head.  Now we are awaiting our new questionnaire that must be completed by the end of the year.  The contents of that will determine whether we achieve Top Seven status in 2010, two years ahead of schedule.  The Community Accelerator program has definitely lived up to its name in Dakota County; our efforts, just idling a few months ago, are making the jump to light speed. 

A partner in Community Technology Advisors, Bill Coleman serves as executive director of Dakota Future.  He can be reached at bill@communitytechnologyadvisors.com.