Building Success for Your Municipal Network
With billions in public money becoming available for broadband investment, communities around the world see an opportunity to build a better future full of employment gains, business growth and educational access for all. A successful network provides high-quality, reliable service to places in the community that need it most and at a price that residents and organizations can afford. So, how do you make it happen? Building Success for Your Municipal Network serves as a step-by-step guide through 7 principles proven to lead to success.

Hamilton Mayor’s Intelligent Community Task Force – Final Report
The Mayor’s Intelligent Community Task Force was originally tasked with a two-year mandate to explore, discuss, and build upon Hamilton’s existing digital infrastructure. A key priority was also to focus on the six indicators of an Intelligent Community found in the ICF Method. As we reach the two-year mark, the Task Force is taking stock of its achievements and identifying areas for future consideration. This report is intended to provide insight into the progress that has been made, and that has laid the foundation for the Task Force to continue to work towards its mandate.

Investment Ready Abbotsford: The Story of an Intelligent Community
While the great cities of the world increasingly act as economic magnets, midsize and smaller cities and counties are carving out a niche of their own. Digital technology has helped concentrate wealth in such iconic places as San Francisco and New York, Berlin and London, Singapore and Taipei, but that power can also be harnessed by the emerging cities and regions. It takes a determined strategy and consistent execution to replace the natural magnetism of great cities. But the digital revolution that has upended so many ways of life and work also gives lesser-known places, like Abbotsford, new and exciting opportunities to build a better future.

The Intelligent Community in Numbers (Class of 2018 – Infographic)
The Intelligent Community in Numbers report is a statistical portrait of the Intelligent Community, a snapshot based on data submitted to ICF by hundreds of communities of every size, on every continent and in both rural and urban settings. This infographic shares some of the findings of the report.

Humanizing Data
Data has become the heartbeat of the new economy and the lifeblood of smart public policy in the 21st Century. Two words born in the mid-1990s still shape our understanding of data’s central role. Engineers at Silicon Graphics, an early tech innovator, began talking about “Big Data” at about the same time the words “Open Data” first appeared in a report, which advocated for the free exchange of scientific information. Whether big, open or both, data has become the beating heart of business and government. By fueling a better-informed society, it supports human hopes and human potential. It is valuable when it contributes to prosperity, knowledge, safety, cultural richness and greater collaboration, and it is threatening when directed to lesser goals. In the 2018 Intelligent Community Awards and Summit, we celebrate the people, the communities and the innovators who are humanizing data for the economic, social and cultural benefit of the community.

The Internet of Cities
The latest shiny technology is always exciting. But the truth is that technology advances only at the speed of humanity. The word “technology,” after all, means “knowledge applied for practical purpose.” In our tech-saturated age, we tend to think of the technology itself driving change but that is an illusion. The true revolutionaries of our digital century are human beings applying knowledge to accomplish things both practical and visionary. We therefore offer a different phrase – the Internet of Cities – as the theme of ICF’s 2017 Awards and conference program. We focus, not on the connections among machines, but on the connections among people in a specific place on Earth – the place called home – which are enabled and empowered by information and communications technology. Through the Internet of Cities, we work to ensure that technology-powered growth benefits the many rather than the few and contributes to a better life for all.

Broadband: The Essential Utility
Broadband is the next essential utility, as vital to economic growth as reliable electricity, clean water and good roads. These utility systems are engineered for scalability, can support new uses, and upgrades do not typically require changes to the ways that people engage with the services. As broadband becomes more essential to the economy and everyday life, should not expectations for ease of use and availability and affordability be the same as those for water or electricity? If so, it seems that simple, unconstrained, upgradable models for broadband provision will be the preferred choice in future. Download the report.

From Revolution to Renaissance
Preparing for the future has never been easy. It has seldom been harder, however, than it is today. We already live in a world where the largest taxi company on earth owns no vehicles. Where the world’s most popular media owner creates no content, the largest accommodation provider owns no real estate and the most valuable retailer stocks no inventory. Those companies are, respectively, Uber, FaceBook, Airbnb and Alibaba, according to Tom Goodwin, writing for TechCrunch.com. Their businesses were made possible by the enormous growth of the Internet, and they are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the radical changes that this network-of-networks is driving through how we live, work, shop, travel, worship, educate and entertain ourselves. Download the report.

The Revolutionary Community
The work of creating an Intelligent Community often begins in crisis. But once the crisis is past, how do Intelligent Communities maintain their momentum and avoid being caught unprepared by the next wave of change? They engage in urban and regional planning – a deliberate, strategic and collaborative effort to design a prosperous, inclusive and sustainable future for their people. But this is planning with a difference. They know that today’s disruptions in technology, the economy and the environment will only grow more intense. They understand the profound impact that the broadband economy will have on their physical form, the delivery of services and their competitive advantages. So they approach the planning of land-use and infrastructure, sustainability and community development in revolutionary ways. Download the report.

Community as Canvas
Where humans are, there is culture. Culture gives us a sense of identity and belonging. It also creates intellectual property that can have substantial economic value. It is the foundation for all progress and also and set limits to how much progress we can make. In the 2013-2014 Awards cycle, ICF will focus on the power of culture to help or hinder the transformation of towns, cities and regions into Intelligent Communities. Download the report.

Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities Program Report
Publication of this report marks the completion of a two-year collaboration between the Inteligent Community Forum and the Blandin Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to creating vibrant rural communities in the state of Minnesota. For the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) project, ICF adapted its global Intelligent Community Indicators to measure the readiness and progress of 11 communities in rural Minnesota. For more information about this report, click here.