Between 1860 and 1900, inventors created the telephone, phonograph, moving pictures and air transportation.  Thomas Edison tested the first practical lightbulb, Karl Benz built a workable internal combustion engine and David Edward Hughes transmitted the first wireless signal – and they did it during just one three-month period in 1879. The result was a golden age of economic growth from about 1900 through the 1960s, with a broad-based rise in incomes across the industrialized world.  

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”

That is not how ICF selects the Intelligent Community of the Year – which we will name on June 8 at our Summit in New York City. Instead, we spend a year on data-gathering, analysis and inspection.  The mirror, frankly, would be easier.  But it would miss the point.  The Intelligent Community of the Year is not the fairest of them all.  It is the leader, usually by a few percentage points, among a group of cities and counties that point the way to a better future for every place call home. 

In the running again this year is Ipswich in Queensland, Australia.  I visited there in May to conduct their Top7 site inspection.  Unless you live in Queensland, you have probably never heard of it but it struck me as of the most successful cities on planet Earth.

With all due respect to the government of the Russian Federation, I would like to suggest that it turn over the operation of its visa system to the IT Department of the City of Moscow. 

I came to this idea during my site visit to the 2017 Top7 Intelligent Community that is Russia’s political and business capital.  In Moscow, within a period of only five years, the city has created digital infrastructure that is transforming for the better the lives of citizens, the practices of business and the honesty and efficiency of government services.  But before you can witness this transformation, you have to get a visa from the Foreign Ministry.  

Москва вошла в топ-7 самых умных городов мира по версии Intelligent Community Forum (Форум интеллектуально сообщества). ICF — американская некоммерческая организация, которая «изучает экономическое и социальное развитие мировых сообществ XXI века». Главной задачей форума стал поиск и выявление городов, в которых жизнь граждан, благодаря уровню развития технологий, оказывается более благоприятной и комфортной. В 2002 году основатели ICF получили грант от правительства Канады, произвели исследование шести городов, стараясь понять, какие технологии позволяют одним городам развиваться лучше, чем другим, и как эти факторы можно использовать для улучшения жизни граждан. В том же году была учреждена премия Intelligent Community of the Year — «Самый умный город мира».

Moscow joined the top 7 most intelligent cities in the world version of Intelligent Community Forum (Forum intellectual community). The ICF - US non-profit organization , which "examines the economic and social development of the world community XXI century". The main objective of the forum was the search and identification of cities, in which the lives of citizens, thanks to the level of technology development, is more supportive and comfortable. In 2002 the founders of the ICF have received a grant from the Government of Canada, made a study of six cities, trying to understand which technologies allow one city to develop better than others, and how these factors can be used to improve the lives of citizens. In that same year the award Intelligent Community of was established by the Year «The most intelligent city in the world." -

Ideas come from amazing places.

Last week, I attended ICF’s first European event, The Rural Summit, in Eindhoven, Netherlands. It was produced in association with the Huis van de Brabantse Kempen. That is an association of local Dutch governments in the rural region of the Kempen, which sprawls across southern Holland into Belgium.

There is a small ray of light in this dark American election season. The Presidential contenders actually agree on something: the need to bring back manufacturing in America. To quote from an editorial by Binyamin Applebaum:

Trump’s keynote proposal is to encourage domestic production by taxing imports — an idea more likely to cause a recession than a manufacturing revival. Clinton is promising to basically extend the efforts of the Obama administration, which said it would create a million factory jobs. With just a few months left, the president is still more than 600,000 jobs short.

Big Data is big business. But what difference does it really make in the cities, suburbs and towns where we make our homes? Does the Big Data future belong entirely to the big tech companies like Google and Facebook? Or are there benefits that matter to the rest of us in the place called home? Robert Bell is a co-founder of the Intelligent Community Forum and co-author of Brain Gain: How Innovative Cities Create Job Growth in an Age of Disruption and he joins Carol Maresca and Corey Johnson to talk about it.

“Internet of Cities” the theme of the New York think-tank’s annual Global Awards Program

Is Robby the Robot casting a covetous eye on your job?  Or on the jobs of your friends, colleagues, citizens and taxpayers?  A 2013 study by an Oxford University researcher forecast that as many as 47% of jobs in the United States were at risk of being automated out of existence in the future.  These are jobs with a lot of routine work in them that do not, on the other hand, require the soft skills of interaction with human beings.  

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” wrote that American political leader and man of letters Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “but not to his own facts.”

I am concerned - and you probably are as well - about the rising political polarization of our time. Whether it is the candidacy of Donald Trump, with its “the truth is whatever I say today” style, or the increasing appeal of right-wing, anti-immigrant, anti-compassion parties to the electorates of Europe. Each side has its truths and seems willing to stick to them, regardless of the inconvenient intrusions of reality.