(October 31, 2018 – New York City, NY, USA) – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) today released Humanizing Data: Using Big Data and Open Data to Engage, Help and Serve the Community. The new research report shares successful examples of data usage for the benefit of all citizens in the 2018 class of Intelligent Communities.

ICF selects a theme each year to supplement the six indicators of the ICF Method on which the selection of the Smart21, Top7 and Intelligent Community of the Year is based. In the 2017-2018 Awards cycle, ICF focused on Humanizing Data because data has become the heartbeat of the new economy and the lifeblood of smart public policy in the 21st Century.

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Flickr Creative Commons, Jere Keyes

How do you prepare your community for the future? That is ICF’s mission: to offer insights, based on the experience of other places, that help you position your city, metro region or county to be one of the winners – economically, socially and culturally – in a century of enormous change.

But what kind of future, exactly, are we talking about?

It’s a good question. Whatever the future holds, you can feel it coming at you. You can reach into your pocket or handbag, where you keep your phone, and touch it. Twenty years ago, digital technologies were an entertaining diversion from the business of life. Today, they run the economy. They shape politics and public discourse. They determine who wins and who loses in the job market. They turn unknowns into stars and, as evidenced by the #MeToo campaign, can topple giants.

But what does the digital future look like? I am indebted to W. Brian Arthur of the Sante Fe Institute for an article in the McKinsey & Company quarterly newsletter, which does a wonderful job of painting a picture. He wrote for a business audience, and I take the liberty here of translating it into community terms.

I should have seen it coming when "friend" became a verb.

I refer, of course, to the ability to friend someone on Facebook. But while Facebook may be in the hot seat right now in the US and Europe, I am not interested in turning up the temperature. Rather, I am interested in what "friending" says about us and this thing called the internet.

Would you go into the town square and start sharing your most intimate secrets with total strangers? Then why do you do it on the internet?

Victor Frankenstein is a fictional character who created life from a collection of spare parts in an 1818 novel by Mary Shelley.

Mark Zuckerberg is a Harvard dropout who founded a company that went from zero users and zero revenue in 2004 to more than 2 billion monthly users and nearly $28 billion in revenue today.  That makes him a living (if alarmingly young) legend.   

Kevin Roose tied the two neatly together in a New York Times editorial, "Facebook's Frankenstein Moment."  It's well worth reading, because it presents the best imaginable example of a challenge that will face the place you live in the next 20 years.  

ICF now accepting nominations for the 2018 cycle to determine the 20th Intelligent Community of the Year

(July 6, 2017 - New York City) – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) today announced “Humanizing Data” as the theme for the 2018 cycle of its prestigious Intelligent Community Awards Program, which closes nominations on September 13, 2017.