The Intelligent Community Forum announced on January 14 its list of the Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year, each a model for economic development in the 21st Century, at PTC'08 in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Top Seven announcement is the second stage of ICF's annual Intelligent Community awards cycle. Gaining a place among the Top Seven is a major achievement as well as a step toward even greater recognition for communities working to create prosperity and social inclusion in what ICF terms "the broadband economy."
The Top Seven were selected, based on analysis by academic experts, from among the Smart21 Communities of the Year, a group of semi-finalists named by ICF on October 25, 2007 in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, which was the 2007 Intelligent Community of the Year. On May 16, one of the Top Seven will be named 2008's Intelligent Community of the Year during ICF's Building the Broadband Economy annual summit in New York City.
At a PTC'08 reception honoring the Smart21 Communities, ICF co-founder Louis A. Zacharilla announced the 2008 Top Seven. He noted that, for the first time, the Top Seven included three American communities, plus three from the rest of the world that were named to the list a second time. Among those is Tallinn, a finalist in 2007 as well.
Listed in alphabetical order, the 2008 Top Seven Intelligent Communities of the Year are:
Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom; Fredericton, New Brunswick; Canada, Gangnam District, Seoul, South Korea; Communities of the Northeast Ohio region, USA; Tallinn; Westchester County, New York, USA, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA.
ICF notes the reasons for Tallinn’s nomination as follows:
“A suggestion by Estonia's president in 1995 that schools be connected to the Internet led to an ICT revolution that has linked 100% of Tallinn's secondary schools to the Web and established over 600 public access points. More than 100,000 adults have received ICT training, while e-government programs have produced one of the most advanced smart card systems in Europe and a middleware program that slashes the costs of e-government. It was not until 1994 that the last Russian troops left the country, yet today, Tallinn receives 77% of all foreign direct investment into Estonia and seven out of ten in its workforce are in the service sector.”
For more, visit
www.intelligentcommunity.org