Words Matter In Building Intelligent Communities
The Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) is an international group of city, town and regional leaders as well as scholars and other experts who are focused on quality of life for residents and intelligently responding to the challenges and opportunities provided by a world and an economy that is increasingly based on broadband and technology.
To quote from their website: “The Intelligent Community Forum is a global network of cities and regions with a think tank at its center. Its mission is to help communities in the digital age find a new path to economic development and community growth — one that creates inclusive prosperity, tackles social challenges, and enriches quality of life.”
Since 1999, ICF has held an annual contest and announced an award to intelligent communities that go through an extensive investigation and comparison to see how well they are achieving these goals. Of hundreds of applications, some are selected for an initial, more in-depth assessment and become semi-finalists in a group called the Smart21.
Then the Smart21 are culled to a smaller list of the Top7 most intelligent communities in the world each year. There are rigorous quantitative evaluations conducted by an outside consultancy, field trips, a review by an independent panel of leading experts/academic researchers and a vote by a larger group of experts.
An especially important part of the selection of the Top7 from the Smart21 is an independent panel’s assessment of the projects and initiatives that justify a community’s claim to being intelligent.
It may not always be clear what separates these seven most intelligent communities from the rest. After all, these descriptions are just words. We understand that words matter in political campaigns. But words matter outside of politics in initiatives, big and small, that are part of governing.
Could the words that leaders use be part of what separates successful intelligent initiatives from those of others who are less successful in building intelligent communities?
In an attempt to answer that question, I obtained and analyzed the applications submitted over the last ten years. Then, using the methods of text analytics and machine learning that I teach at Columbia University, I sought to determine if there was a difference in how the leaders of the Top7 described what they were doing in comparison with those who did not make the cut.
Although at a superficial level, the descriptions seem somewhat similar, it turns out that the leaders of more successful intelligent community initiatives did, indeed, describe those initiatives differently from the leaders of less successful initiatives.
The first significant difference was that the descriptions of the Top7 had more to say about their initiatives, since apparently they had more accomplishments to discuss. Their descriptions had less talk about future plans and more about past successes.
In describing the results of their initiatives so far, they used numbers more often, providing greater evidence of those results. Even though they were discussing technology-based or otherwise sometimes complex projects, they used more informal, less dense and less bureaucratic language.
Among the topics they emphasized, engagement and leadership as well as the technology infrastructure primarily stood out. Less important, but also a differentiation, the more successful leaders emphasized the smart city, innovation and economic growth benefits.
For those leaders who wish to know what will gain them recognition for real successes in transforming their jurisdictions into intelligent communities, the results would indicate these simple rules:
• Have and highlight a solid technology infrastructure.
• True success, however, comes from extensive civic engagement and frequently mentioning that engagement and the role of civic leadership in moving the community forward.
• Less bureaucratic formality and more stress on results (quantitative measures of outcomes) in their public statements is also associated with greater success in these initiatives.
On the other hand, a laundry list of projects that are not tied to civic engagement and necessary technology, particularly if those projects have no real track record, is not the path to outstanding success — even if they check off the six wide-ranging factors that the ICF expects of intelligent communities.
While words do matter, it is also true that other factors can impact the success or failure of major public initiatives. However, these too can be added into the models of success or failure, along with the results of the textual analytics.
Overall, the results of this analysis can help public officials understand a little better how they need to think about what they are doing and then properly describe it to their citizens and others outside of their community. This will help them to be more successful, most importantly for their communities and, if they wish, as well in the ICF awards process.
© 2020 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved
