Rio de Janeiro’s story is the struggle between the rich and poor, the have’s and have-not’s and those digitally rich versus those technically deprived.

Rio has struggled with this for decades. However, in my estimation, Rio’s civic administration has emerged triumphant through the development of several Knowledge Squares (Praça do Conhecimento), an initiative with the goal of focusing on culture and education for the people living in the surrounding hillside slums, or favelas.

These favelas have been notorious in the past for the infamous Rio drug lords and their dangerous conflicts with the police force. In recent years, gun battles have given way to pacification, a program in which the citizens of the favelas support the government’s movement to create a better society for their citizens.

On my most recent visit to Rio, my friend Franklin Dias Coelho, the City of Rio’s CIO, took me to visit Bairro Carioca, a new urban area in Rio de Janeiro that contains one of 6 Knowledge Squares that the city government created in 2012. In these Knowledge Squares, local workers and students are offered access to technology and if qualified, to IT training through Cisco’s Networking Academy. Cisco's global education network serves 25,000 Brazilians and forms part of an initiative that involves over 1 million students in 165 countries. About 120 youngsters in Bairro Carioca participated in the training last year in program modules training for help desk support, internet specialists or to develop network technicians. Cisco also provides support for teacher training and various educational materials at the six Knowledge Squares throughout the region. Bairro Carioca also includes a housing project with over 2000 subsidized housing units, a school, kindergarten and other facilities. My friend also took me to another Knowledge Square in the Nova Brasília community, at Morro do Alemão, in Rio.

These Knowledge Squares are an example of one of the most dramatic and extensive opportunities to provide digital inclusion for its citizens anywhere I have ever seen. Knowledge Squares consist of a large central area with smaller pods serving as training facilities. In the center of one of the Knowledge Squares that I visited is a large electronic multimedia display in the shape of a tree in which people are able to play with icons and words to arouse curiosity and begin their quest for knowledge. Other displays provide information including the history of the area, information on its culture (in this case, it was the local center for Samba music and dancing) and other content. Surrounding the central space are classrooms, a library, language labs and recreation areas. Outside is an open area for films to be shown on weekend nights.

While the Knowledge Squares are intended primarily to capture the interest of young people in the favelas, their parents and siblings are often attracted to them for the opportunity to explore the technology provided by various technology providers. The Knowledge Squares I visited were packed with young people, some showing evidence of their poverty in their faces and the clothes on their back. The local teams of security guards were more like coaches and mentors. The staff who trained the local students in the computer labs seemed highly supportive and friendly. I recall years ago that these kids might form marauding youth gangs from the favelas. Today they are keen instead to be part of the excitement of the new age of enlightenment. 

In Lyons, New York, where I was raised, there was typically one complaint that ran straight through the center of town and among those who were leaving for the larger world, as well as those staying behind.  It was that everybody knew everybody else’s “business!”   In those days, people seemed to like their privacy and relative anonymity.  To say that someone “minded their own business” was considered a compliment – kind of.  Privacy was observed, and yet the local culture had a way of knowing who might be a threat in their private cocoons and who was simply nurturing a rich inner life (or was an eccentric who drank too much hard apple cider at night).  We watched one another.  The reinforcing mechanism that evolved to run the alliances among the people, schools and businesses was - are you ready - gossip.  People, who are verbal and tribal beings, have allowed gossip to become a cultural pastime as well as a monitoring tool.  We all knew, or thought we knew, everyone else’s affairs.  No IPTV network running hundreds of video cameras or Facebook pages were necessary.

Who knew that not only was this a cultural asset, but that in the not too distant future technology would enable it, enshrine it as a great economic virtue and yet, at the same time, threaten to make it one dimensional and increasingly suspect.  I suspect we are now rethinking this.

As we head into the ICF’s 2013 Summit, where we will have a closer look at seven communities that are working nicely, thank you very much, the notion of collaboration and its potency has emerged as the “secret sauce.”  For the past few years it has been expressed as the “triple helix.” It appears as a part of a persistent dialogue, whose concepts are increasingly harnessed like a raw material by a range of management and logistical processes which then produce economic success.    It uses the tools of the Internet and the cloud in new ways and enhances their capabilities.  It allows creativity, which French tightrope walker Philippe Petit jokingly calls, “the perfect crime,” to flourish.  It is also done through a lot of talking, committee meetings and – yes – gossip on email.

In Taoyuan and Taichung, Taiwan, two of the year’s Top7 Intelligent Communities from Asia, the sense of community is everyone’s business.  In Taichung’s case so are the resources of its 16 universities and technology corridor, precision machinery technology park and science and software parks.  Each is now getting to know one another’s “business” through a new Taichung Software Park Industry-University Council.   This is a collaboration the size of a dragon, or two.  Understanding that there is a compelling need to innovate and to drive deeper toward a connected, global economy, what emerged in Taichung, after much discussion, is an extension of the powerful business alliances that have already made Taichung the world’s third largest exporter of high-tech precision machinery.  The newly formed Council will include a massive databank for managing collective resource inventory, as well as a “talent breeding model” to produce Executive Masters degrees.  It will be run by a dedicated office to pilot the city’s software industries toward global markets, which await.  The alliance includes 26 incubation centers and the intellectual brainpower of 156 departments related to some aspect of the local and national economy.  It is a classic, Confucian example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.  (Remember the Beatles?  Or the Allies in World War II?   Then you know what I mean.)  Or, as author E.O Wilson notes in his best-selling new book, The Social Conquest of the Earth, this is an example of why human beings, like wasp ants and but a few other species, tend to overrun the planet.   It’s not the brain, it’s the culture.  As Google CEO Eric Schmidt says in HIS new book, “the brain is the greatest invention ever, but we did not invent it.”

Culture, however, is a different matter.  We did invent that, sort of, and as it expresses itself we are painfully aware that technology cannot in any sense replicate it.  That is left to us and to social evolution.  What we can do is to mind our business, tend to our community’s interests and note that inside each culture is a way to form councils and alliances that not only give us full economic lift, but also the privacy and emotional security we need to align ourselves to reach higher.  As I learned in Lyons, if you do not feel secure in your place, you cannot tolerate or appreciate anyone knowing your business.

“Sometimes, I think it’s a sin when I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again.”

That memorable morning-after line was written by Canada’s great singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, in a 1974 hit, Sundown.  It came to mind last week when I was conducting Top7 site visits in Canada and reading an article by Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast.  The title was a real grabber: “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class.”

According to Kotkin, Dr. Florida recently admitted in the pages of The Atlantic, “what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members – and do little to make anyone else any better off.”  

The flaw in the Creative Class idea turns out to be simple: attracting a horde of high-skilled hipsters tends to push up the cost of living, so that any benefit to lower-skilled workers is lost.   In an impressive show of academic honesty, Dr. Florida admitted, “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.”

According to Kotkin, “For Rust Belt cities…following the ‘creative class’ meme has not only meant wasted money, but wasted effort and misdirection.  Burning money trying to become ‘cooler’ ends up looking something like the metropolitan equivalent of a midlife crisis.”  

Far beyond the rust-belt in places like New York City, Kotkin finds inequity incongruous with the lifts-all-boats Creative Class meme: “In nouveau hipster and increasingly expensive Brooklyn, nearly a quarter of people live below the poverty line. While artisanal cheese shops and bars that double as flower shops serve the hipsters, one in four Brooklynites receives food stamps.”

A public battle of ideas is always interesting.  But my purpose here is to suggest a more serious risk of wasted effort and misdirection.  In recent years, Dr. Florida has evolved from his Creative Class focus to become a major proponent of urbanization.  In The Atlantic, where he is an editor, he wrote: 

Cities are our greatest invention … because they enable human beings to combine and recombine their talents and ideas in new ways. As highly skilled people concentrate in these places, the rate of innovation accelerates, new businesses are created, and productivity – and, ultimately, pay – grows…The critical mass for knowledge work is higher than for manufacturing: the knowledge economy thrives at a larger scale.

It’s a powerful argument for a more urbanized world.  But here’s the thing: cities have been fulfilling this role for – and I’m not making this up – 3,000 years.  Cities work, except when they become nightmares of dysfunction.  To avoid that dire fate, a new movement called Smart Cities has sprung up to install sensors, networks and automation systems through urban areas to make them run faster, cheaper and better.  In a very short time, it is becoming its own government-industrial complex, with everybody from the European Union to the biggest names in technology putting their shoulders to the wheel.

Recently, as I watched the image of Life of Pi director Ang Lee walk up to the podium to accept his Oscar, I had no idea that this absolutely fascinating eye candy of a movie was produced in Taiwan. When he mentioned in his acceptance speech that he thanked his homeland of Taiwan and specifically the people of Taichung, I recalled that Mayor Jason Hu had told me about his association with the famous director when we met in Taichung last April, but I never connected the dots when I saw the movie. Why would I? Isn’t everything produced in Hollywood? Ok, maybe London, Toronto or maybe one of the other megacity locations such as Sydney or Mumbai. But Taichung? 

According to a report in the Taiwan Review, the Director General of the Taichung City Government’s Information Bureau, Jean Shih, provided an insight into why Ang Lee chose to make the movie in Taichung, in central Taiwan, over other global locations. Taichung’s Mayor is an old friend of Ang Lee, personally inviting him to shoot the film in his city, making the decommissioned Shuinan Airport near the city’s center available for the film, a location that needed work but was good enough to become the center for the filming of the movie. Shih admits that some of the filming did take place in India, but the majority of the movie was eventually shot in Taichung, Taipei and Pingtung.

But it required much leadership, as Mayor Hu personally coordinated efforts to attract Lee’s American film crew to come for fact-finding tours to assess Taichung’s moviemaking environment. According to the Taiwan Review, these efforts resulted in Taichung city government joining forces with the central government to offer the director subsidies of more than $9.5 US million to film the movie in Taichung. This was good enough to result in 250 technicians and artists to work on an award-winning movie, but more importantly leaving a legacy for Taichung and Taiwan in the ever-growing race for content, creative industries, talent and financial deals that today could potentially be located anywhere. 

Yes, megacities attract talent, financial opportunities and grow clusters, but megacities are also big, difficult to maneuver, penetrate and take advantage of; some would even call them impersonal and anonymous, so that it’s often much easier to build relationships and take advantage of connections and opportunities in smaller regions or in regions where initiatives become individually more important in order to be able to get things done. Places like Taichung may not have the dazzle of filming megacities like LA and London, but are good alternatives since they are highly agile, high-velocity locations. Add the elements of Intelligent Community into the mix and it gets very interesting indeed. 

Recently I hosted Mr. Suneet Singh Tuli, who is nearly single-handedly impacting mass education in India by having developed a tablet that will provide 250 Million students in India with the tools to learn from teachers from around the world, connect by phone and email as well as use applications to be creative and share these with other students throughout their region and around the world. He is not running with the big “800 pound gorillas” as he calls them. He is a small firm, originally from Brampton Ontario, that punches above their weight. His tablet can be made for $35 and he sells it for $40 to the Indian government. It is affordable and is a pretty good smart application, similar to the original iPad and iPhones, which originally sold for hundreds of dollars. These iPads and iPods at their astronomical prices would not have been able to be sold to the masses in India when they first came out. 

But Tuli’s Aashtak Tablet sells for a very affordable $40 and is being gobbled up by the politicians in India and in many other countries around the world. Mr Tuli’s goal is to bring a suitable, “frugal” tool that can be accepted and easily made available to the next 3 Billion end users. It may not be the excellence displayed in the latest Apple iPhone 5, nor the next Samsung Android, but for the masses, as he says, “it is simply good enough”. In fact, it is more than “good enough”, but not when you compare it with the flash and brilliance of the newest Blackberry Z10. But that is not his goal. Instead his goal is to get these tools into the hands of millions who can use the Aashtak Tablet: this will be their salvation; their gateway to education and to a promise of a better life.

If you have ever been greeted by a large toilet seat as you arrived into town, you most likely were driving into the Nevada community of Battle Mountain.  Few other rural communities in the USA or elsewhere have the credibility to welcome you that way.  Or the guts.  Forget the cliché that “first impressions” are the most important.  It has always been gross impressions that count most.   According to Maury Forman, author and director of rural entrepreneurship for Washington State’s Department of Commerce, who I dub the Intelligent Community movement’s resident humorist, Battle Mountain was referred to by a Washington Post writer as America’s “armpit” in 2001.  That stunk.  It was also unfair, but revealed how some urban writers may have thought about small communities.  The Washington Post, for the record, is based in Washington, DC, the city which uses toilets very effectively, mainly to flush down good ideas for connecting villages, as well as taxpayers’ money.  

Rather than get depressed or, worse, defensive, the city took notice.  It took notice with a sense of humor.  Then it took action.  It performed an exercise in economic development and creative public relations which resulted in the Festival of the Pit.  Short for armpit of course.  The Pit was a hit.  The festival’s 2004 talent pageant, which ended in a tie between a woman who glued crickets to her underarms and a tiny girl who did breakdance, was one of many tongue-in-cheek events that led Old Spice deodorant, an international brand, to become a major corporate underwriter.  Today, a blue grass festival has replaced the Pit.  However through the process the community regained its pride and fired one of our movement’s first shots to signal the start of the rural renaissance.

In most parts of the world, urban and rural cultures have been out of balance and out of synch for at least two generations.  The imbalance has exacerbated the stresses of the global economy and made cities desirable.  A two-fold tragedy occurred as young people fled, while referring to their rural districts or the cultures they left behind as being in “the middle of nowhere.”  (My least favorite phrase.)  But the Middle of Nowhere is no more.  Basically communications changed that.  So did common sense.  The change has been most effective when linked to a coherent strategy, as I observed during my recent trip to both Washington State and Taiwan.

In Taiwan, there is a new way to view the digital divide.  In the words of Chunghwa Foundation CEO Mike Lin, a former Microsoft executive, “we turn the digital divide into a dividend.”  The cloud, broadband and the Intelligent Community Forum’s concept of ecosystem evolution are altering the imbalance and, in the case of agriculture, education and entrepreneurship the results are as striking as the orchids grown and exported by Taichung-based Green Culture Biotechnology.  

Green Culture Biotechnology is located in one of this year’s Top7 communities.  It is part of a community cluster whose success is tied nicely to an approach that many nations preach about, but which Taiwan is perfecting patiently and effectively.  Note that I do not say easily.  It never is.

Green Culture, housed in a factory with clean rooms and an R&D equivalent to any of Taiwan’s silicon wafer foundries, geneticallyengineers tissue culture to raise orchids that are exported around the world.  It owns patents for virus control and detection, as well as patents for the nano machines that detect viruses.  It even developed a new generation of plastic containers for shipping the young orchids to Europe and Brazil.  A walk through the rows of its prime orchids is to imagine what the landscaping may be like in Heaven.

If it were all alone in the community, or situated on the outskirts of the “middle of nowhere,” Green Culture would still be an impressive business.  But in Taichung, it is symbolic of a city which, due to the alignment of central government funding and the governance of cities, is part of a municipality which includes a vast agricultural district.  The city of Taichung has responsibility for its rural areas, which includes native Taiwanese tribes and many schools and universities in its mountainous areas.  This gives it sensitivity to the environment.  But the city’s push to become “green” is obsessive.  Taichung is more ecologically sensitive than Hawaii, in my experience.  It natural, given its heritage and its shrewd understanding that quality of life is capital.  It is helped by the political and cultural alignment of city and countryside.  Rather than neglect the rural, it emphasizes agriculture, education and entrepreneurship.  Its rural schools are connected and its students have wonderfully talented teachers and principals with an ability to teleconference with other teachers in the city and access any book anywhere through a mobile system.  (Oh yes, the average elementary school student reads an average of 200 books per year and collaborates online with its classmate to produce other books!)  Its farmers are aided by a “triple helix” of local government, academia and connectivity by the two carriers, Chunghwa and VeeTime, to produce value-added fruits and produce for markets such as Singapore.  

Is it a perfect place?  Far from it.  I am told that in Taoyuan, the other Top7 Intelligent Community, there is still a desire by developers to cover over many of its 1,000 ponds.  But I suspect that attempt will not go all the way – or will be balanced.  Taiwan has its own champions, as Battle Mountain had.  Taiwan’s is the famous “Rice Bomber,” Jang Yu-Men, whose Seed Project evolved from a series of “bombings” ten years ago.  Not the terrorist type.  Yang planted rice-filled explosive devices in Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 in protest against what he called the government's neglect of farmers.  He has since adopted a more peaceful approach in his efforts to revitalize agriculture and promote a vision of development.  Today, the government has unveiled programs that reach out to anyone wishing to become a farmer and return to the land.  The life on the land is never easy, but the economic and social rewards – the landscaping of Heaven which is now possible – are not romantic notions, but a part of local GDP.  The Green Cultures of the world are booting up in Taiwan.