I WAS sent a tweet by a friend at Wanganui District Council. "Look Eric!" Whanganui has just been named one of a "Smart21 Community" in the first stage of the international Intelligent Community Forum's annual Intelligent Community Awards cycle. This is very exciting.
The Intelligent Community Forum is a New York-based think tank that studies the economic and social development of the 21st Century community. Communities globally are challenged to create prosperity, stability and cultural meaning in a world where jobs, investment and knowledge increasingly depend on advances in communications.
To help communities everywhere find sustainable renewal and growth, ICF shares the best practices of the world's Intelligent Communities adapting to the demands of the Broadband Economy.
The award itself celebrates leadership in making positive impacts at the local level that stem from the deployment of broadband. The next round narrows the field to seven communities (announced in January) and after that the final round chooses the year's one winner. At this stage, even making the top 21 in this international field is a major achievement, and something about which Whanganui should be immensely proud.
But why is an award for creative use of broadband a useful topic for an opinion-piece about conservation? People behind telecommunications are just beginning to look at how those responsible for protecting and managing the environment can use newly developing telecom applications to help quantify and address the conservation challenges they face.
Information and communication technologies, in particular geographic information systems (GIS), are becoming essential tools for policy makers, planners and those dealing directly with environmental issues, both responding to existing situations and trying to prevent future problems.
This is being illustrated from pilot studies from around the world. Telecom-Environment is an initiative of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) Telecommunication Development Bureau set up to demonstrate the importance of the role of information and communication technologies in protecting the environment. Pilot projects are being prepared in collaboration with ITU members and partners in industrialised countries to highlight the use of telecommunications in natural resources management. They range from control of bush fires in Senegal to an information server on the environment of countries in the southern Mediterranean.
Getting broadband is important for Whanganui. Using it cleverly, and being seen to do so, is critical. Applying our new tool to addressing some of our current environmental issues is a wonderful opportunity to lead New Zealand in a field for which our country is already well respected internationally. The potential for this is great - projects in GIS alone could keep us thinking for decades. Examples and include making it easier to satellite track whio/blue duck on the Whanganui River and map their relationships to environmental features and, perhaps, their predators.
In another example from London, GIS is being used to develop strategies for managing waste through statistics mapping and flow analyses.
Being first cab off the rank with broadband in New Zealand gives us a responsibility to our community to use to use it to address the breadth its possibilities.
Being connected to each other, and to the challenges we face, will become increasingly important over the next decade. As Benjamin Franklin famously said "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
See more about Whanganui's achievement with the ICF at www.intelligentcommunity.org.
Eric Dorfman is the director of the Whanganui Regional Museum.