When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven representatives from The Netherlands donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus representatives from Ohio storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club.

What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done by a group of people from around the world to analyze the information from these cities, assess it and judge them for you, the world’s media and other aspiring places. They are the ICF Analysts and Jurors, the heart and soul – and the brains – of the ICF Awards program.

When you watch ICF’s videos on Youtube, what you see publicly are representatives from a city celebrating when their city is named Intelligent Community of the Year. Sometimes, as in the case of the mayor of Espoo, Finland, you see tears of joy. Sometimes, you see Eindhoven representatives from The Netherlands donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus representatives from Ohio storming the stage behind their mayor like a football club.

What you do not see is the incredibly hard work done by a group of people from around the world to analyze the information from these cities, assess it and judge them for you, the world’s media and other aspiring places. They are the ICF Analysts and Jurors, the heart and soul – and the brains – of the ICF Awards program.

(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.