We continue our Leadership series by looking at an issue facing many communities, particularly in the US - Policing. First, we speak with an LA Times crime reporter about some of the issues that face the large city, and then we speak with representatives from two intelligent communities to learn their solutions.

(June 14, 2022 – New York City, NY, USA & Binh Duong, Vietnam) – On June 21, 2022, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) and Binh Duong province will jointly present the 2022 Top7 Intelligent Communities Conference & Announcement: After the Pandemic: How Digital Innovation Drives Growth in Our Communities. The day-long conference features live and online events in Binh Duong, culminating in the announcement of the Top7 Communities of 2022. ICF co-founder Louis Zacharilla will be at the live event to deliver the keynote address on the current state and evolution of the Intelligent Community.

The Top7 Communities are chosen from among the Smart21 Communities of 2022 to be finalists in the yearly Intelligent Community Awards. In October 2022, one of these seven communities will be named the Intelligent Community of the Year at ICF’s Global Summit. The city of Binh Duong was one of the Top7 Communities of 2021 and is a Smart21 Community again this year.

Homelessness is a complex but solvable problem. In Hamilton’s Systems Planning Framework: Coming Together to End Homelessness, our community has laid out a roadmap for ending chronic homelessness by 2025. This means building a system that ensures homelessness is prevented whenever possible, or if it cannot be prevented that it is rare, brief, and non-recurring.

FREDERICTON–HOTSPOT, A FREDERICTON-BASED PARKING APP, HAS BEEN ACQUIRED BY IBI GROUP, A TORONTO-FOUNDED TECHNOLOGY FIRM.

HotSpot was founded in Fredericton in 2013 and is now present in over 80 municipalities, cities, and universities across Canada. The app also has more than 460,000 users and some presence in every province.

IBI, which stands for Infrastructure, Buildings, and Intelligence, has about 60 offices worldwide.

Continuing in our Leadership in Unconventional Times series, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla is joined by Dr. Peter Williams.

Estonia, the little country that packs a punch, is celebrated in tech circles for giving birth to unicorns like Skype, Wise and Bolt (and, more recently, customer experience platform Glia and ID verification company Veriff).

Why are so many successful startups emerging from a small pocket of Europe? And can the unicorn paddock keep growing?

The Taiwanese government spares no effort to promote new tech trends in sports to help people live a longer and healthier life.

The City of Kyiv’s IT Department has reconfigured its city apps to provide citizens with a range of services, including finding bomb shelters and medicines, to a quality of life despite the threat of bombardment and terror. In this episode, city leaders join together to discuss this extraordinary approach. 

Intelligent Communities focus their efforts on change for the better in an increasingly challenging, digital modern world. But what happens when times go from challenging to troubled or even outright catastrophic? What sort of leadership is required to guide and strengthen your community no matter what the times may bring?

I wrote my last post, “Why Are We Falling Apart?” in response to a heartfelt editorial by David Brooks of The New York Times. Confronting today’s epidemic of inhumane behavior in America – reckless driving, unrest in schools, fights on airliners, hate crimes and murders – he asked, “What the hell is going on?” His plaintive and honest answer was “I don’t know.”

In my post, I explained why I thought we have been falling apart – not just recently but gradually for the past 40 years, and not just in the United States but in fellow industrialized nations around the world.

But understanding reasons is only gets us so far. What matters is what we can do about it.