Mitchell, a city of 15,000 on the plains of South Dakota, where it is the center of a region that has lost 30% of its population over the past 70 years. But Mitchell has carved out a sharply different destiny. With a willing private communications company and a Federal broadband stimulus grant, Mitchell has developed a fiber-to-the-premise network serving every business and residence. Its university and technical school have leveraged the city’s agricultural heritage into academic leadership in precision agriculture, in which farmers use satellite and remote sensing data to develop a highly detailed portrait of their land and apply that knowledge to boost yields.

Stratford is a city of 32,000 at the center of a rural Canadian county 2 hour’s drive from Toronto. Its largest employer is the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, a seasonal business that attracts cultural tourists from a large market. To leverage its value, Stratford’s City Council and the local business community created a public-private Stratford Tourism Alliance.

Castelo de Vide is an inland Portuguese city of 3,400 people that has suffered the fate of many small, rural communities. As young people left in search of opportunity, its population gradually shrank and its economic base eroded. Tourism based on its 500-year history became Castelo de Vide’s most important industry. To leverage it for a sustainable future, the city decided to re-connect its economy to the world. It developed a wireless broadband network to serve businesses, citizens and tourists and put its municipal IT “into the cloud” to reduce costs and expand capabilities.

In the largely rural Canadian province of Alberta, a group of young farmers have formed a nonprofit called Green Hectares in 2008. Its mission is to foster dynamic rural economies while bringing sustainability to agriculture. It takes existing and new community-based programs promoting entrepreneurship and smarter farming and shares them over a growing online community. To keep that community growing, Green Hectares operates a mobile computer lab and brings technology, entrepreneurship and agricultural training events to communities throughout the province.

$6.6 million project monitored 11 communities over two years and tracked increases as high as 60% in the use of broadband to boost their economies

(New York City, New York, 12 June 2013) — Connecting rural Minnesotans with the Internet boosts their abilities to do things like find new job opportunities, engage in continuing education and strengthen business performance. The evidence of these significant gains is contained in the Minnesota Intelligent Rural Communities (MIRC) project. The $6.6 million project spanned from 2010 to 2012. Robert Bell, co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) compiled data on the five key indicators that the ICF knows are crucial to any community’s success in the digital age. Bell’s analysis shows the 11 MIRC test communities made substantial progress.

In the late Nineties, the telephone company in Malaysia, together with a Malaysian university and money from the Canadian government, created a pioneering Internet access project in the remotest highlands of Borneo. The residents of the village of Bario there received a computer, a generator and a satellite terminal, which connected them to the Web for the first time. The impacts were striking. Teachers used the Web to show their students the world beyond the Borneo jungle. Traditional medicine gained a helping hand from remote doctors. Bario is renowned in Malaysia for the sweet fragrance and taste of the rice it grows. Through the Web, farmers learned the true value of their crop, which gave them new bargaining power with local middlemen.

If over 70% of the world’s nine billion people are jammed into mega-cities by 2050, would everyone really want to live in one? ICF seeks to define new role for prosperous rural communities.

Over 50% of the people on earth now live in cities, often at the expense of rural areas, and the UN projects that by 2050 that percentage will increase to over 70% as the global population exceeds nine billion people.* Today, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) announces The Rural Imperative, to call attention to the challenges facing rural communities in the 21st Century, and provide a framework for them to seize their destinies and identify ways to create sustainable, long-term prosperity.

The Province of Nova Scotia pioneers a business model for rural high-speed internet

In 2006, a majority of Nova Scotians enjoyed high-speed Internet service, but broadband connectivity was still unavailable for thousands of citizens living in rural areas. The government of Nova Scotia recognized the lack of high-speed Internet access to be a key social and economic issue for the more rural areas of the province. Although 78 percent of the province’s roughly one million residents had broadband connectivity, these were mostly located in Halifax, Sydney and other urban areas. About 200,000 citizens, 93,500 dwellings, 5,600 businesses and hundreds of schools and medical facilities remained unserved because they lived outside the reach of traditional wired broadband technologies.