If you are considering this book, you probably know about the Smart Cities Movement. You know Smart Cities are more livable, more workable, and more sustainable. What you probably don't know is that it takes three ingredients for cities or regions to be truly SMART Cities or Regions - innovative policy, integrated technology and community advocacy and action.Who are the right advocates and what action is needed? Those are the questions this book answers.Today the advocates are most often government agencies and the action being taken is slow, incremental and ad-hoc.To truly experience the promise of the Smart Cities Movement, we need the Community Sector to define a multi-faceted action plan that leads to greater tech profits, lower governmental costs, an increase in the quality of life for all (not just those in cities). What we need is a Smart Regions Movement!Readers of this book will learn exactly:* Who is preventing critical information from reaching the community, thereby keeping the civic leaders unengaged and holding citizens hostage. Learn how to keep Smart City leaders accountable.* What damage urban-centric decisions do and why we must commit to ending the "urban" and "rural" divide* Why individual government agency programs are often counterproductive, slow, and not cost-effective.* Where specific tools and economic integration strategies need to be put into place to create a Smart Region based upon the often multi-state service area of a metropolitan area.* How a well-designed telework system gives employees freedom to live anywhere, creates less congestion, emissions, energy use at no cost to the government, while improving the fiscal and operational conditions of the private sector and the quality of life in our neighborhoods.Smart Cities ARE happening. No matter where you live, you will feel the impacts of how this issue is resolved. For private citizens and for-profit organizations to benefit from the infrastructure that is being created, we must engage and shape the process before it is too late.This book offers a more proactive, vision-based, common sense data structure achieved through collaboration with the community. If you care about how to Smart Cities movement evolves, you must read this book.