The year 2008 was a good one for the Intelligent Community of Tallinn, Estonia. In recognition of the amazing efforts that vaulted the city from post-Soviet depression to “Baltic Tiger,” according to The New York Times, ICF added Tallinn to its list of the Top7 Intelligent Communities for the second year in a row.

There is an intellectual eruption taking place in a tiny corner of the New York publishing world that is a microcosm of the big battle underway for the hearts and minds of people in cities worldwide. As behemoths slide into being with trending names like “Broadband Economy,” “Singularity” and “Gigabit City” to take hold of the economy, our imagination, and then push with increasingly uncomfortable force against the personal destinies of larger and larger numbers of people, places and leaders, the impact of two decades of digital life are being felt. Some call it “disruption” and, having named it think they’ve tamed it and take a seat at the next clichéd seminar. But the words “disoriented and dispossessed” seem more accurate ways to describe what a generation of “smart” risks leaving us with if we are not mindful.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice,” an aerospace engineer once said to me. “But in practice, I find that there often is.”

Those two short sentences sum up a lot of wisdom about the net neutrality debate.

Why do people go to conferences, summits, seminars and roundtables? Why don’t we just sit in the comfort of our homes, sit back and turn on our Skype, WebEX or GoToMeeting online meeting services and do it all from there? Well, it’s clear that we no longer need to be at every meeting or every event. Skype, WebEX and any other media that provides an Online Webinar and meeting service will do just fine in most cases. And when they work, we praise technology from saving us from yet another trip.

The best thermometer of how the world views the 2015 finalists for the world’s most Intelligent Community of the Year designation is best found in the press coverage. This year the lesson is that dark horses have reached for the top. Forbes noted that the Top7 “are not the cities you think of immediately” as tech powerhouses. The UK’s Independent said as much and concluded by saying that we can learn from them. Noting the population differences the Independent referred to Mitchell, SD (pop 15,000) as the “minnow” of the group. The South Dakota community, in the mind of the press, is swimming upstream in its quest for further glory in Toronto in June when we will announce the 2015 Intelligent Community of the Year.

On January 22, ICF narrows its 2015 list of 21 really smart communities to a short-list of 7 intelligent ones. Those two words – smart and intelligent – are often confused or often used to mean the same thing. But I think they describe very different realities.

Every Intelligent Community we have seen is a Smart City. That is, it invests in information and communications technology (ICT) to deliver services, monitor operations and rejigger failing systems. That is good news for taxpayers, businesses and institutions.

Over the past 100 days the people have spoken. In several important cities they decided to lift their voice and open the exits for several incumbents. New mayors and elected officials were sworn in among several Intelligent Community Forum Foundation cities, including three Intelligent Communities of the Year, Toronto (2014), Taichung (2013) and Taipei (2006). These champions replaced familiar, popular and controversial leaders. The most notable for me was in Taichung, Taiwan.

“The Day Salman Khan Quit His Job…

Education, as practiced for the past millennium, is not particularly productive. Teaching has always been one of those professions, like medicine or music, in which customers vastly prefer quality to productivity. A teacher can effectively teach only so many students … The problem appeared insoluble until 2004, when Salman Khan began tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in math over the Internet….Nadia prospered and soon other relatives and friends sought Khan’s help. So he decided to pre-record tutorials and distribute them on YouTube...The videos turned into a viral hit and attracted enough financial support from donors to let Khan leave the hedge fund. One of his supporters, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, said “It was a good day his wife let him quit his job.” … Today, the Khan Academy has an online library of more than 4,300 videos on elementary and secondary math as well as computer science, biology and other topics...”

Any community using technology to improve its economy can participate in the rigorous yearlong awards program

New York City – July 9, 2013 – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) announces the opening of nominations for the 2014 Intelligent Community of the Year award. The 2014 awards marks the 16th year the New York-based think tank will name the Intelligent Community of the Year, a community that is a global leader in creating wealth and jobs by seizing the opportunities of information and communications technology (ICT).

$6.6 million project monitored 11 communities over two years and tracked increases as high as 60% in the use of broadband to boost their economies

(New York City, New York, 12 June 2013) — Connecting rural Minnesotans with the Internet boosts their abilities to do things like find new job opportunities, engage in continuing education and strengthen business performance. The evidence of these significant gains is contained in the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) project. The $6.6 million project spanned from 2010 to 2012. Robert Bell, co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) compiled data on the five key indicators that the ICF knows are crucial to any community’s success in the digital age. Bell’s analysis shows the 11 MIRC test communities made substantial progress.