Butyn is a rural locality in the Odintsovsky District in Moscow Oblast, Russia. It is listed as having 180 residents. The hamlet is in the western portion of Golitsyna, which like many places, has a population that continues to decline. It was down to about 17,000 in 2010.

It has one fewer son this year.

Butyn is not an Intelligent Community but Butyn is the birthplace of the (as-of-recently) late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Dr. Simon Potter, Director of the College Office of Research Enterprise at New Brunswick Community College.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Elizabeth Golluscio, A NY tech exec and mother who decides to serve her community by running for office in one of the most high-profile districts in Manhattan. 

Hilliard technology companies needing to test their artificial intelligence-powered products will have a new tool, thanks to a grant from the Hilliard Development Corporation (HDC).

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Chris Gillis, Manager for Applied Research Business Development Durham College.

(January 23, 2024 – New York City, NY, USA & Toronto, ON, Canada) – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) and the Urban Robotics Foundation (URF) announced today a partnership aiming to share best practices on robot integration in communities by local governments around the world. Through the partnership, ICF and URF will exchange content, expertise, and communication resources with each other’s networks, and collaborate on content including a webinar and an online course to be released later this year.

The Smart City Summit and Expo (SCSE) in Taipei is one of the largest conferences and expositions for smart city technology and trends in the world, taking place in a nation that produces 60% of the world’s semiconductors. From March 19 through 22, SCSE will host 150,000 visitors at convention centers in Taipei and Kaohsiung. Joining them will be an ICF delegation from cities, technology companies, universities and public-private accelerators organized in partnership with the ICF Institute in Taiwan and the national organization ICF Taiwan.

Social, economic and political division have a cost. I suspect we can all agree on that, despite our divisions. But how much is it?

In 2023, two ratings agencies downgraded the credit worthiness of the United States. Their reason? Division, specifically the repeated down-to-the-wire debt ceiling battles that threatened the government’s ability to pay its bills. The agencies admitted the downgrades would have no immediate impact on America’s ability to borrow. That word “immediate” reminded me a Hemingway character who, when asked how he went bankrupt, said, “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The price is hard to measure because, most of the time, it is about lost opportunity. Take local government. When voters are divided, they alternately elect leaders of wildly different beliefs about the right way to govern, often with the speed of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde and back again. Each set of leaders condemns the work of their predecessors and starts building something new, only to see it torn down again with the next change of office. Forward motion freezes and, with it, the ability to seize the opportunities streaming by.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Amy Rowland, Award-Winning Novelist and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.