Hello #smartcommunityfriends, it’s our podcast birthday! The Smart Community Podcast has turned 3 years old! So to celebrate we’re doing a week of bonus episodes, bringing together multiple guest answers over multiple days to the question, ‘Where to next with Smart Cities and Communities?” And this time I’m sharing with you the answers from a range of our guests this past year: 

• Leanne Kemp from Episode 155
• Andrew Mears from Episode 195
• Adam Davis from Episode 197
• Julia Spicer from Episode 152

Listen here:

Some themes come through in the guest answers around the challenges and opportunities for Smart Community thinking and initiatives in regional areas and local initiatives. As you know I’m passionate about the regions.

We have to work together both within regions and across regions to create enabled, informed and engaged communities. When we bring new skillsets into the community to help bridge skills gaps, we need to make sure that we are also ups killing the locals so initiatives can be sustainable over the long term. 

Several guests make important points about the need for better connectivity and the pivotal role of local government in regional areas.

And of course all guests agree on the power of people in regional areas and the importance of engaged communities. Once again we are reminded that a Smart approach is not about the tech, but about the humans at the centre. This is only amplified in regional areas. 

As Julia Spicer says, “It’s really important that we remind people who live here 365 days a year why it is that they live here. We are not trees, we could move….It’s important that we sign on to the vision of what our communities want to be.”

We’ll be back in your pod catchers tomorrow with another bonus episode. As always, we hope you enjoy listening to this episode as much as we enjoyed making it.

Find the full show notes at: www.mysmart.community 

Connect with me via email: hello@mysmart.community 

Connect with My Smart Community via LinkedIn or Twitter and watch on YouTube

The Smart Community Podcast is produced by Perk Digital.