Creative community initiative:
Regions' digital divide will not be reduced unless the digital democracy process started in local level. Based on this belief, SDS/ICT is promoting "creative community initiative" to encourage local communities and citizens to actively involve and participate in creating their own communities by using information and communication technologies that reflect the true needs of communities/citizens. The creative communities also allow communities to participate in the local and central government policy-making process interactively. Some countries call creative communities smart communities and some countries call them teletopia/media cities.

The Bank and the initiative:
In order to accomplish the Bank's four objectives 1)economic development, 2) social development, 3) sustainable development and 4) governance development to implement ICT activities in the region, there are three essentially different approaches that IDB beneficiary countries might take 1) a private-sector-driven approach; 2) a national government-driven approach; and/or, 3) community- or local government-driven approach. The third approach is particularly seen as promising for building locally appropriate IT infrastructures, namely, the application of IT driven by the needs and priorities established of local community members and institutions, including some combination of municipal, private sector and civil society actors. However, other than a few experiences, such models of IT infrastructure development have typically been only anecdotal and thus have to date not produced fully-documented, replicable models in the Latin American/Caribbean Region; nor, perhaps for these reasons, have such community-driven models of IT deployment been widely adopted.

Definition:
According to Industry Canada that defined "smart community",a creative community is a community with a vision of the future that involves the use of information and communication technologies in new and innovative ways to empower its citizens, institutions that include local government, private sector and academic sector and regions as a whole. As such, the community makes their own decision to create a better health care delivery, better education and training and new business opportunities. Communities around the world are responding to the needs of their citizens by discovering new ways of using information and communication technologies for economic, social and cultural development. Communities and countries that take advantage of these new technologies will create jobs and economic growth as well as improve the overall quality of life within their communities.

Experience in the LAC Region:
Latin American and Caribbean countries have already begun to improve public administration through the implementation of e-government capabilities, processes and techniques. Some countries start to seriously involve in the similar initiative with creative communities or smart communities. One example is the Little Intelligent Communities project (LINCOS project ) in Costa Rica. Directed by the former president of Costa Rica, Jose Maria Fugueres, the Fundacion Costa Rica para el Desarrollo Costa Rica, is sparehedding this initiative to create modern community centers with ICT platform to provide telemedicine, video conference, distance education program to the citizens in the communities. The same LINCOS initiative can be seen in Dominican Republic and the other Central American countries.

Experience in Outside of the Region:
Outside of the region, we can see many community driven informationalization initiatives and experiences in all over the world; above mentioned, Smart City program in Canada , I can 21 (former Teletopia) which approved and financed 150 unique local government IT initiatives in Japan (eg.Gifu prefecture ) initiatives in Europe, Parthenay, France(Digital town), the multimedia island (MMI) concept in Okinawa , Ennis, Irland (Information Age Town ), initiatives in the US, Blacksburg, Virginia, San Diego, California (Global Village), Albionn, Michigan (The info network) and initiatives in other countries, Victoria, Austlaria (VCNET ).

The funding methodology and/or focus are slightly different in each country/region; however, the concept is the same: empowerment of the community to create most open (between government and citizens and among citizens themselves), transparent and efficient communities with the best use of information and communication technologies.

Cyber city study project ( link to word Doc 2.07 MB, document in Spanish ) :
As an initial effort of the Creative Community initiative will be found in the SDS/ICT studies in Peru (Cyber city study project) (link to the draft). ICT conducted studies in three distinctive cities in Peru; Villa El Salvador (Ciudad Joven, extremely poor city within the district of Peru), Piura (Middle size-fishery city in North ) and Arequipa (Independent well educated large city in South). This study examined whether the above mentioned I can 21 model in Japan can be replicated in the region. The studies were financed by the Japan Program . Based on the study results (via focus groups and interviews) that reveal what that city/community wants, ICT is to conduct pilot projects in the two cities. ICT is planning to do the same to other regions using different models in the world; Japanese model, Canada's Smart City model and some models in Europe. The studies and pilot project will eventually leads to larger loans.