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19th October 2011

i-Canada Conference and Community Assessment Tool Updates

i-canadavia CATAAlliance – Every day, a new Mayor or partner joins i-CANADA, to help power-up the Intelligent Nation. At the i-CANADA’s conference, “The New National Dream”, opinion-leaders will consolidate plans for their transformation into Intelligent Communities — places where jobs grow, the environment is sustainable, and life is stimulated by the arts, media and a vibrant society.

The Windsor i-CANADA meeting is the first meeting of the i-CANADA National Advisory Board and they are being joined by many other Canadians to discuss plans and strategies for raising Canada to become one of the world’s leading Intelligent Nations. The Honourable David Alward, Premier of New Brunswick and Chair of i-CANDA’s Governor’s Council is a keynote speaker. His presence is timely considering the Globe and Mail story on October 17th mentioning “50 New Millionaires” that have recently joined the New Brunswick millionaires’ club as a result of investments in two New Brunswick companies. New Brunswick’s communications infrastructure and collaboration ecosystem have been fundamental factors in New Brunswick’s success in the Intelligent Community movement” said Bill Hutchison.

The CATAAlliance is calling on private & public sector executives to take a leadership role by participating in the first i-CANADA event being held at Caesars in Windsor this November 16th through17th. The agenda for “The New National Dream” is available online as a PDF, and online registration is open.

Topics for the “New National Dream” include:

  • The resources your organizations can offer to build competitive communities
  • The secret to creating an ecosystem for growing millionaires
  • A graphic tool that shows your community’s strengths
  • Best practices from successful global cities
  • The status of i-communities across Canada
  • The i-Waterfront billion-bit challenge
  • Channeling collaboration among community groups

In addition to local and national political leaders and a social media group of 1100 executives, partners for the event include TechnoMontreal, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, and the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. It’s a great opportunity to build your network of key contacts.

Dr. Sorin Cohn, i-CANADA’s Chief Program Officer, has released the first in a set of Intelligent Community Assessment Tools (i-CAT) to guide communities through the process of becoming more globally competitive as  “Smart Cities” or Intelligent Communities” A quick Self Assessment i-CAT tool is already available on-line for community leaders who want to be ahead in the competitive race and want to start working with i-CANADA on the best ways to advance their community’s status.

“The set of Assessment Tools is the product of massive collaboration with industry leaders such as IBM, Intel, FunctionFour, ING DIRECT, Miller Thomson, and Rhyzome Networks,” said Dr. Cohn.  “We collected the available best practices and added our own insights and research. The resulting set of Assessment Tools will reveal a community’s factors of strengths and weaknesses, determine its momentum, and help it build the collaboration and e-solutions ecosystem.  Understanding this is essential to a community’s competitive survival in the open global marketplace.”

The i-Community Assessment Tools consist of a combination of information from benchmark data and on-line surveys and the information is organized according to the five layer Intelligent Community Open Architecture Model, (i-COA©).  The five layers or domains covering how citizens work, live and play are:

  • Place
  • Infrastructure
  • Collaboration Ecosystem™
  • Solutions
  • Life

“This i-COA framework was developed following years of work with municipalities and countries around the world,” said Bill Hutchison, creator of the architecture, adding that “Our goal is to give Canadian communities a proven model and a path to renewed economic and social innovation through the challenge of competing against other communities to win the “Intelligent Community of the Year” Award, given out annually by the Intelligent Community Forum in New York.  A ranking as the Intelligent Community of the Year is a signal of global recognition, but even more important is the fact that all winners of the Intelligent Community of the Year award inevitably achieve the benefits of sustainable new employment, increased economic growth, social prosperity and a greener environment.”

The Self Assessment i-CAT tool is the first in the i-CANADA Assessment Tool line-up to be offered to communities. The complete detailed Assessment Tool is now being released domain—by-domain and Windsor is “street testing” the Collaboration Ecosystem Domain. Communities that complete the initial i-CAT  “Light” assessment will have an opportunity to show their profile and results of the survey at the i-CANADA “New National Dream” event. The online ‘light’ version of the Assessment Tool will take a municipal official only a few hours to complete, according to Dr. Cohn.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2011 at 8:31 am and is filed under Associations, Events, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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