(New York, NY – February 26, 2019) – The Intelligent Community Forum (www.intelligentcommunity.org) announced today the appointment of Moez Chaabouni as Chair of the independent international jury that helps ICF select the Intelligent Community of the Year. Mr. Chaabouni, an entrepreneur and tech executive, is the former Deputy CIO of Columbus, and currently works as a senior account executive for Informatica, a world leader in enterprise cloud data management. He succeeds the Jury’s founding Chair Jagadish Rao, who retired from a long and distinguished career with IBM and lead the ICF jury since its inception.

The ICF jury consists of officials of previous Intelligent Communities of the Year and subject matter experts from government, business, academia and other organizations around the world. The responsibility of the jury each year is to review reports on the Top7 Intelligent Communities and rank the Top7 to help determine the year’s Intelligent Community of the Year. Combined with qualitative and quantitative assessment of written information by ICF Analysts, the result combines academic rigor with the Jury’s vote.

In the final stage of the Awards program, an international jury reviews site visit reports prepared by the co-founders who visit each of the Top7 Communities.  They jury is made up of officials of previous Intelligent Communities of the Year and subject matter experts from government, business and academia.  In addition to the site visit reports, the jury has access to the questionnaires submitted by the Top7.

Based on their review of this material, jury members rank the Top7 in their order of preference through an online ballot.  ICF aggregates their ranking and combines it on a weighted basis with the numeric scores generated in the selection of the Top7 from among the Smart21 Communities of the Year.  The result is an analysis that combines academic rigor with insight into the human factors that drive community success.    

The current Chair of the ICF Jury is Moez Chaabouni, former deputy CIO of Columbus, Ohio, USA (2015 Intelligent Community of the Year) and Solutions Architect for Informatica.