It is hard to precisely define Smart Community. Often, Smart Community is used in plural form - Smart Communities, and interchangeable with Smart City. Wikipedia gives us this definition: A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate information and communication technology (ICT) and Internet of Internet of Things (IoT) technology in a secure fashion to manage a city's assets. These assets include local departments' information systems, schools, libraries, transportation systems, hospitals, power plants, water supply networks, waste management, law enforcement, and other community services. A smart city is promoted to use urban informatics and technology to improve the efficiency of services. ICT allows city officials to interact directly with the community and the city infrastructure and to monitor what is happening in the city, how the city is evolving, and how to enable a better quality of life.
The four factors that contribute to the definition of a smart city that most commonly accepted, is listed by Deakin and Al Waer, in their published Journal of Intelligent Buildings International: From Intelligent Cities to Smart Cities as follow:
The application of a wide range of electronic and digital technologies to communities and cities
The use of ICT to transform life and working environments within the region
The embedding of such Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in government systems
The territorialisation of practices that brings ICTs and people together to enhance the innovation and knowledge that they offer
We understand that the world is evolving, and society has become increasingly digital, mobile, and connected. Smart communities in short, are the places that recognize the trends and willing to adopt the intelligence infrastructure effectively, deliver services efficiently, collaborate freely, and analyze data for local benefits.
Smart communities achieve exciting lifestyle benefits for residents, robust economic opportunities, and more efficient governance within a safe and healthy environment.
We should agree that there is no universal way to design a community of the future, and there is no standard smart community in terms of achievement; hence one can set their own scope of contribution. TimeTec, as a self-proclaimed smart community system developer and provider under its flagship solution – i-Neighbour, despite the broad definition of the terms, is confined to exploit its ICT and IoT expertise to contribute its effort innovatively in the area of the residential communities.
