Founded in 1861 by Father Albert Lacome, the city of St. Albert is a striking blend of culture, history and community. St. Albert began as a small town around the Father Lacombe Chapel—which stills stands today on Mission Hill—in the Sturgeon River valley northwest of Edmonton and grew into the second-largest city in the Edmonton Metropolitan Region. In addition to the Father Lacombe Chapel, the city is home to the St. Albert Grain Elevator Park, which houses two historic grain elevators. But for a city rich in historical sites, St. Albert is most defined by its community of residents constantly striving to improve life and embrace new innovation. St. Albert Place, located at the heart of the city, is a classic example of this attitude. It was designed by a world-renowned architect as a “people place” from the start and currently houses the St. Albert Public Library where residents can gather to learn about new technologies and opportunities in the modern world. This gathering of residents from local government positions, local businesses, academia and the general public has produced St. Albert’s Smart City Master Plan.

Access for All

A core component of St. Albert’s Smart City Master Plan is providing high-speed Internet access throughout the community. St. Albert has created its own municipal fiber optic network, which now connects half of the city’s municipal buildings, intersections and assets. The city plans to expand this coverage to all assets in the near future. St. Albert is also using this network to offer licensed wholesale access to community groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and local school districts, as well as to industry.

In addition to fiber, the city is expanding its cellular service infrastructure, including building new towers, new fiber backhaul, and new microcell installations to allow citizens to use their wireless cell service everywhere. St. Albert is working with service providers as part of this initiative to offer free Wi-Fi service in public places throughout the community with most free Wi-Fi locations now up and running.

Training the Workforce of the Future

St. Albert has developed several programs to help train its younger citizens for future careers and to assist young entrepreneurs in the more difficult phases of starting up. The city operates the Collective facility where local youth can access a series of Marketplace programs. The programs include skill-building workshops—such as Ready to Rent, a course that provides education and resources for finding and maintaining housing—counselling and outreach, entrepreneurship training with highly qualified mentors available and the Building Assets and Memories (BAM) program. The BAM program has attracted dozens of youth members who have organized retreats, a youth-issues conference, foreign missions and many popular community events. In addition to these programs, the Collective provides meeting spaces for youth to gather and exchange ideas and for entrepreneurs to get started on their companies.

Fostering an Innovation Ecosystem

To attract innovators to the city as well as provide an ideal environment for local entrepreneurs, St. Albert has partnered with residents and academic and industry leaders to establish itself as a “living lab.” Entrepreneurs and innovators can test their products, ideas, and commercialization plans in the city, making it an attractive place to build new businesses. Since becoming a living lab, St. Albert has seen resident entrepreneurs form an Innovation Council. Working together with the local chamber of commerce, business incubator and university, the Innovation Council launched the St. Albert Innovation Forum in 2017, an event open to the whole community where residents can share new ideas and debate policies for future competitiveness in the city. The Innovation Council has also created a Capital Partnership Program, a new platform to help innovators attract investors.

Digital Literacy at the Public Library

With Internet service rapidly approaching 100% availability in St. Albert, the city has turned to its library to train residents to use all the new technologies available to them. The St. Albert Public Library offers a wide array of digital literacy programs, including classes on using email, mobile devices, social media, Google apps and Microsoft Office products, as well as introductory programming, coding and game design courses. In addition to attending classes at the library, residents can also make use of the library’s Outreach Literacy Van, a mobile classroom staffed by a Community Outreach Librarian. The Literacy Van visits schools, clubs, churches and other community centers and provides a total of 60 different technology literacy programs with more being added each year. The library is currently planning a drop-in Makerspace program focusing on virtual reality, robotics and other emerging technologies to be launched sometime in 2018.

In addition to classes, the St. Albert Public Library has expanded its technological services, providing 45 public workstations with free Wi-Fi access for patrons. In 2017, these workstations saw more than 34,000 Internet work sessions. People have always been St. Albert’s greatest resource, and the city continues to nurture that resource, helping residents achieve their greatest potential and improve life for all.

Population: 65,589

Website: https://stalbert.ca

Smart21 2018

In this episode if The Intelligent Community, ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla interviews Rochester's Mark Buckley and the Center for Technology in Government's Meghan Cook about New York - the state, not the city - and intelligent community development.

Three Australian cities and two in New Zealand have made the short list produced by the New York based Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) for recognition as being the world’s smartest community.

The think tank has named Adelaide, Prospect (SA), the Sunshine Coast, Wellington and Whanganui in a list of 21 cities to begin its annual eight-month process that will conclude with it naming the 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year in June 2020 at the ICF Summit.

Whanganui has been declared one of the global communities "most ready for the 21st century".

Once again, Whanganui has been named a Smart21 Community by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), a New York-based think tank which helps communities adapt to a digital economy.

Adelaide has again been named one of the world’s top smart cities, winning a spot in the Intelligent Community Forum’s (ICF) ‘Smart21’.

The announcement, made on 22 October, comes as part of the ICF’s 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program, which recognises communities that demonstrate best practices in broadband implementation, workforce development, digital inclusion, innovation, advocacy and sustainability.

10 Nations including Estonia and New Zealand Represented on List

22 October, 2019 – New York City, NY and Rochester, NY (USA) – In a ceremony from the Arbor at the Port in Rochester, New York and a simultaneous global announcement online from its New York City headquarters, the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) today named the world’s Smart21 Communities of 2020.

Selection of this group of regions, cities and towns begins the think tank’s annual eight-month process which will conclude when ICF names the 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year in June 2020 at the ICF Summit. These semi-finalists for the New York-based ICF’s international award are global communities deemed most ready for the 21st century. Each has applied the six principles of ICF’s Method to begin to build local economic expansion and prosperity, social health and cultural richness. The ICF believes that these factors together make a community strong and resilient. Each community chose to make the journey from Smart City to Intelligent Community and many have been working on their programs for several years.

The price of freedom in any culture, society or community ultimately comes down to the cost of people being able to make the right choice for themselves and for future generations.

A Supreme Court justice once said that, while the USA’s Constitution was inspired, it did not come with a guarantee that people and places would automatically prosper. It ensured that the people, of whom the government was for, would be protected to make any choice they sought best.

“If people want to go to Hell, I will help them,” he added. “It’s my job.”

At ICF we turned that phrase around by declaring that, “If places want to prosper and get on the path to prosperity and stability, we will show them a method for doing it.”

But it can be Hell to get there.

Peter A. Baynes is Executive Director of the New York StateConference of Mayors and Municipal Officials (NYCOM), the membership association representing New York’s city and village governments. NYCOM has been in existence since 1910.

Mr. Baynes has been employed by NYCOM since 1985, having previously served as Legislative Analyst, Director of Intergovernmental Finance, and Deputy Director. He received a B.A.in History from Siena College and has taken Masters-level courses inHistory and Public Policy from the State University of New York at Albany.

Year-Long Awards to culminate in June at the ICF Summit in Dublin, Ohio, USA

(July 11, 2019 – New York City) – The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is calling for nominations for the 2020 cycle of its prestigious Intelligent Community of the Year Awards Program.

The annual Awards Program, which is run by the New York-based think-tank, will name its 22nd Intelligent Community of the Year at the 2020 ICF Summit in June 2020 in Dublin, Ohio, USA. The 2019 recipient Taoyuan, Taiwan, was named in New York in June.

Westerville is a northeastern suburb of Columbus, capital of the state of Ohio, and home to nearly 40,000 people.  It takes its name from the Dutch family that founded it in the 1800s. It was a small place that eventually became known as the “Dry Capital of the World,” based on an 1859 law that forbid the sale of alcohol in the city and the decision of the Anti-Saloon League – which played a leading role in Prohibition – to move its national headquarters there in 1909. It was only in the 1990s, when Westerville annexed land that included alcohol-selling businesses, that local prohibition began to change.   

WeConnect 

In the more than two decades since, Westerville has made a career of embracing change. In 2007, the city began planning expansion of an existing government fiber network to support smart-grid applications. (Like many smaller US cities, it owns its own electric utility.) The planning process revealed a lack of affordable choices for broadband and data center services. That ultimately led City Council to found WeConnect: an underground fiber network connected to a community-owned data center and delivering 100 Gbps connectivity to municipal service providers, businesses, schools, the local university and research institutes.   

The network and carrier-neutral community data center began operations in 2012. By 2018, more than 40 miles of the fiber network had been lit. After an investment of more than US$6 million, WeConnect has been profitable three out of the first six years of operation – and its impact has been much greater than mere speed or capacity. The city spent more than 85% of funds with businesses within a two-mile radius of City Hall, creating jobs and profits that benefited the community. The network and data center have saved customers more than $2 million since 2014, with one customer crediting the network with helping avoid a $1 million capital expense for its own data center. WeConnect has also become an important attractor to business that, when bundled into incentive packages, has helped persuade site selectors to give the community a closer look.   

Benefits of the Smart Grid 

The municipal utility, Westerville Electric Division, got smart-grid applications that sparked the network’s construction. The utility’s operations date back to 1898, but since WeConnect went live, it has rolled out services including advanced metering and an online portal, which let customers monitor electric and water usage by the hour, and a Rush Hour Rewards Program, that offers rebates to customer who let the utility adjust their air-conditioning to better manage peak loads. Realizing that most energy-saving programs target large corporations, it introduced a Small BusinessWISE program that provides energy-efficiency consultants to audit small businesses and recommend changes that will save money.   

New Pathways to a Career 

In 2014, Westerville was one of 14 central Ohio school districts that shared funding for initiatives called Career Pathways, which aim to create new post-secondary education options for students while closing workforce gaps. All are member of the Central Ohio Compact, an agreement among educational institutions to improve access to educational achievement for the next generation. The Health Career Pathways is a collaboration among nine school districts, Columbus State Community College (CSCC) and healthcare providers including Westville’s Mount Carmel Health System. Beginning as early as their first year in high school, students can enroll in the program, which combines high school and college coursework with shadowing of medical professionals. They earn dual credit and have the potential to finish high school with a credential as a clinical lab assistant. The program was piloted in the spring of 2018 with student rotations in two hospital departments; it proved so successful that the rotations have expanded to 16 different spots.   

The Business Logistics Pathway – also a collaboration of CSCC and industry partners – leads to certification as a logistics associate and technician. This earned credit puts students on track to complete a two-year associates degree in supply chain management with only one year of additional coursework, and the opportunity to apply this education to completion of a four-year degree. The Engineering Pathways prepares students for careers in computer-assisted manufacturing, a sector that represents more than 86,000 jobs in central Ohio and is projected to continue growing. Ten school districts, Sinclair Community College and industry partners collaborate to build skills in advanced manufacturing, robotics, design and fabrication. In the most recent year, enrollment grew by 17% for Business Logistics and 100% for Health. Twenty-seven students earned a clinical laboratory assistant certificate in the program’s first two years. 

STEAM Innovation 

Otterbein University in Westerville dates back to 1847 and was the first coeducational college in the United States to admit women to study alongside men in the same classes. In 2016, in another advance, it opened The Point, a new science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) innovation center that ties academics to the business and manufacturing needs of the community. The Point provides office space and support for startups, lab space and prototyping services for small-to-midsize manufacturers, a makerspace for the community and dedicated education spaces for school students. It does not claim ownership of the innovations developed there, a policy it shares with the University of Waterloo in Canada, which is renowned for its ability to generate new companies. The feasibility study for the center projected that it would create 200 new jobs in five years totaling US$16 million in payroll and $3.6 million in state and local taxes.

Welcoming the Stranger 

Digital equality is the province of the Westerville Public Library. In 1994, it became the first library in the state to offer patrons full access to the internet. It now offers computer labs and training targeted at patrons from job seekers to senior citizens, as well as a Kid’s Center, Teen Center and Gaming Room. Anyone baffled by a technology program can get personalized help through the “Borrow a Librarian” program, while the “Borrow the Internet” program lets patrons without internet access at home borrow a Wi-Fi mobile hotspot.  

In recent years, the library has targeted the immigrant population of the region. Central Ohio is home to the second largest Somali population in the US and the largest Bhutanese Nepali population outside Bhutan. In 2015-16, the library won a grant to host Somali language and culture classes, and in 2018, a grant that made it possible to launch technology classes in Somali and Nepali, taught by local Somali and Nepali teachers. Demand has been strong from immigrants eager to make a home in the community.   

Rising to Challenge 

In February 2018, two Westerville police officers were slain as they responded to a domestic violence call – the first deaths of active-duty officers in the city’s 160-year history. Over the next two weeks, the city’s handling of communications and logistics – largely enabled by technology – would prove critical in forging community unity around the tragedy.   

As local and national media picked up the story, the city’s Community Affairs department used Google Drive to disseminate news and respond to media inquiries. City officials were assigned to social media listening to allow the city to respond to misinformation and share the facts. With the establishment of the #WestervilleStrong hashtag, people in the community gained a way to stay updated, express their grief and connect with others through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It also helped city officials monitor the social media conversation and set an appropriate tone.   

Total social media reach during the period topped 2.5 million. The WestervilleStrong Facebook group grew to more than 6,000 followers and, seven months later, was still growing. But the daily number of attempted cyberattacks and phishing emails also doubled during the two weeks that followed the shootings. The city’s established cyber-monitoring systems and user protocols thwarted all attempts to hack the government’s network.   

Westerville has benefited from its proximity to another Intelligent Community – Dublin, home of an ICF Global Institute. It was through the work of that Institute that first came to see its efforts as part of a comprehensive approach to economic and social development in the digital age, and to begin identifying ways to fill gaps and accelerate its progress. Proud of its heritage, Westerville is targeting a future in which suburban and even rural cities have the same opportunities as big cities to make the tech revolution pay off for its people.

Population: 39,737

Website: www.westerville.org

Smart21 2019

Top7 2019