A Weekly Update on ICF’s 2018 Summit & Intelligent Community of the Year Awards

Last week I returned home from Vietnam & from London, where I met with one of our hosts, David Brunnen of Groupe Intellex, to review our pending 2018 Summit. David has been writing extensively about broadband issues and the “smart to Intelligent” concept as it applies to England for several years. As you will recall, he and his colleagues attended the last few ICF Summits and, after deliberation, the group decided to bring the ICF event to London in a time when the nation heads into uncharted waters and the future of its cities will be very different – in perhaps the best possible way.

I also had a chance to meet Summit partners from Digital Greenwich, as well as one of our new Summit Sponsors, Siemens, to discuss plans and to view two of the locales for our 2018 event. You are going to like being in London and these places next June, not only because the city has become one of the two or three greatest cities on the planet (and I say that with the humility of a New Yorker), but because the political climate there includes a move toward more empowerment for UK cities and communities. So as our hosts knew, this is the time to bring the Intelligent Community movement’s Summit and Awards to England to enable a dialogue that, frankly, they need to have in 2018.

The notion of what is called “devolution” there will give a lift to the spirit underlying our Summit. We will get a lift transporting ourselves around venues as well. This will be a classic ICF Summit, with moving parts and multiple venues over the three days (4-6 June). It is the way that we design them. If you are in a city, let’s see the place, not the place’s stuffy hotels.

Transporting ourselves will become an airborne experience when people attending travel from the marvelous Siemens Crystal facility, site of plenaries and other events, (way) over, above and across the River Thames, to Digital Greenwich’s office on the Greenwich Peninsula on the first urban cable car (we call it a tram) of its kind in the UK. The Emirate Airline cable cars are cool little machines, although they never actually stop when you get on or off - so move fast. These will transport us on 4-5 June. You will definitely get a lift.

This is it! The London Summit is off the ground, with registration now live. So be among the first to sign up to visit London with ICF.