Today I spoke with the founding team of Smart North, a coalition of public, private, civic, education, and entrepreneurial individuals and organizations driving Smart City initiatives and thought-leadership within the Twin Cities and Minnesota. Founders include Sabina Saksena (CytiLife), Ben Wallace (Minify Energy) and Thomas Fisher (U of M School of Architecture College of Design).

They are part of a team with diverse but synergistic areas of expertise on how a community can be smarter – through better energy use, autonomous vehicles, using big data to help streamline your schedule (especially during a pandemic), thinking about better use of existing infrastructure to prepare for the future and they want to use this skills to help communities work smarter, more sustainability, more equitably and hopefully be happier.

They want to partner with communities. They have partnerships in urban and suburban Minnesota – they are really looking for rural partners. So check out the video and consider joining us at the March Blandin Broadband Lunch Bunch on March 24 to talk more (and more generally) about smart technologies. (I’ll post more on that session when the date is closer.)

The recognize that broadband is necessary but not sufficient. They are a good fit for a community that has good broadband and is looking to leverage it or a community that wants to build a case to get better broadband.