The Intelligent Community

Many astronauts say that when they initially see the Earth from afar, they look  first  for their hometowns….Eventually, they realize that their true identity as a human….is 'with that whole thing.'" One of the world's most esteemed authors and Space philosophers, best-selling author Frank White, wrote  The Overview Effect  nearly 40 years ago while gazing down at Earth. His hundreds of interviews...

Lou and Ben Winchester continue their discussion about the changes taking place in rural communities and the misperceptions afoot. You will enjoy the second part of this Podcast. While Lou claims, "The Middle of Nowhere is No More," Ben adds, "And we live in the middle of Everywhere!" Ben has been working both in and for small towns across the Midwest for over 25 years. He lives in St. Cloud, Minn...

"The seeds of success for rural economies have been planted!" So says the controversial champion of the rural narrative, University of Minnesota educator and researcher Dr. Ben Winchester, a demographer at the University of Minnesota's. Extension Center for Community Vitality. "If the small town is dying why is there a housing shortage in most parts of rural America!?" Winchester explodes with ent...

Now that COVID is no longer a global pandemic, what is it? And what is the lesson communities learned over the past 3 years? In this rebroadcast of the interview with Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, who was just featured in TIMES100 Health, ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Dr. Jetelina, Director of Population Health Analytics, to learn these answers and more. Dr. Katelyn Jetelina is one of America'...

Lou continues The INTELLIGENT Community Podcast with Adrianne Furniss and touches on the subject of HOW small communities develop brain gain and capacity over the long term.  They also discuss how broadband can reinforce cultural restoration and its role in enabling democracy to persist in the Digital Age. Adrianne Benton Furniss  is Executive Director  and  Board Member   of the  Benton Institute...

Our goal is to bring open, affordable, high-performance broadband to all people in the U.S. to ensure a thriving democracy," says Adrianne Furniss. In a rare interview and her first podcast, the Executive Director of the Benton Institute discusses the current state of rural broadband in the United States and her view of how to build capacity within very small communities that have suffered brain d...

What makes Canadian cities such as Waterloo, Ottawa, and Toronto hubs of high-tech entrepreneurship and successful Intelligent Communities? Since moving to Canada, Professor Darius Ornston, author of  When Small States Make Big Leaps , which chronicled how the Nordic countries developed the ability to enter new, tech-based markets, has similarly studied two Intelligent Communities of the Year in C...

What makes Canadian cities such as Waterloo, Ottawa and Toronto hubs of high-tech entrepreneurship and successful Intelligent Communities? Since moving to Canada, Professor Darius Ornston, author of  When Small States Make Big Leaps , which chronicled how the Nordic countries developed the ability to enter new, tech-based markets, has similarly studied two Intelligent Communities of the Year in Ca...

This week marks the start of another global awards campaign at ICF. We begin the search for the successor to the current Intelligent Community of the Year, Binh Duong, Vietnam. Who will it be? We begin by naming the Smart21 (see the video) on March 20 th .  This year's S21 Awards and Conference will be held in Taipei, Taiwan. Taipei was the 2006 Intelligent Community of the Year and this year host...

A NY tech exec and mother decides to serve her community by running for office in one of the most high-profile districts in Manhattan.  Elizabeth Golluscio looked at her city's $106 billion budget and found that there was limited transparency on how decisions were being made.  She looked at challenges like unlicensed E-bikes (part of the 56,000 deliveries of food in NYC each day!) and met with Pol...

ICF announced early this year that it issued a license for its third Institute. The new ICF Institute will be based in Atlantic Canada, in the city of Fredericton, New Brunswick at New Brunswick Community College. The new Canadian institute joins those established in Dublin, Ohio (USA) and Hsinchu, Taiwan  to further promote the Intelligent Community Forum's method for accelerating the growth of r...

A NY tech exec and mother decides to serve her community by running for office in one of the most high-profile districts in Manhattan.  Elizabeth Golluscio looked at her city's $106 billion budget and found that there was limited transparency on how decisions were being made.  She looked at challenges like unlicensed E-bikes (part of the 56,000 deliveries of food in NYC each day!) and met with Pol...

How does a university become a key driver for starting, building and maintaining industry-academic partnerships for the benefit of the local economy?  Durham College's  Chris  Gillis shares how he develops successful partnerships and overcomes many of the obstacles that keep other communities from moving ahead on this vital piece of the economic puzzle. In his current role , Chris is the college l...

  In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with  Amy Rowland , Award-Winning Novelist and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.   Amy Rowland's second novel,  Inside the Wolf , was published by Algonquin in July 2023. She is also the author of  The Transcriptionist  (Algonquin 2014), which received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the Ameri...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Amy Rowland , Award-Winning Novelist and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.   Amy Rowland's second novel, Inside the Wolf , was published by Algonquin in July 2023. She is also the author of The Transcriptionist (Algonquin 2014), which received the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Ac...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks further with Karl Grossman , Journalist, Host of the Enviro Close-Up TV program and Professor of Journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury. They continue their discussion on the changing landscape of journalism, particularly at the local level. Karl Grossman has specialized in doing investigative reporting in a variety of...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Karl Grossman , Journalist, Host of the Enviro Close-Up TV program and Professor of Journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury. They discuss the changing landscape of journalism, particularly at the local level, and what may be in store for news reporting in the future.   Karl Grossman has specialized in doing investi...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks further with José Roberto Lagunes Trejo , Research and Strategy Lead at Mexico City's Fundación Hogares. They discuss trust and how a social index the Fundación has created is helping repair the social fabric in Mexican communities.   José Roberto Lagunes Trejo is an architect and urban designer from Veracruz, Mexi...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with José Roberto Lagunes Trejo , Research and Strategy Lead at Mexico City's Fundación Hogares. They discuss the method used by José Roberto's organization to reinvigorate rundown neighborhoods and build trust among citizens in places where mistrust and fear have become embedded.   José Roberto Lagunes Trejo is an...

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 sta...

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, The Netherlands representatives donning red shirts in celebration or Columbus, Ohio representatives storming the stage behin...

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF Co-Founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Idoia Postigo , Director General at Bilbao Metropoli-30. Idoia shares the story of how Bilbao recovered from industrial decline and revitalized itself into a city that won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2010. Since the inception of the Association for the Revitalization of Metropolitan Bilbao (Bilbao Met...

In part 2, Chairman and CEO of Toronto's Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara talks about sustainability, why we are far away from it and what Brookfield is going to do to move it into the consciousness of communities.   Luigi Ferrara , Dean, Centre for Arts, Design and Information Technology, leads program development, partnerships and innovat...

Chairman and CEO of Toronto's Institute Without Boundaries and now the Brookfield Sustainability Institute Luigi Ferrara dives deep into how cities are being rebuilt and redesigned for sustainability and why Europe and Asia lead North American communities in this important area.

In this episode of The Intelligent Community , ICF co-founder Lou Zacharilla speaks with Craig Taylor , best-selling author of Londoners and, most recently, New Yorkers: A City and its People in Our Time . To tell the story of New York City post-9/11 and COVID, Craig lived in New York City for over 5 years and immersed himself in the city's extraordinary soup. New Yorkers is a series of interviews...