Building a cyber smart community

Abstract

This chapter shares some methods that could be employed in order to construct and deploy a local cyber smart community in a developing economy, where the notion of smart communities seems to be fitting and significant compared to that of smart cities. Researchers have conducted many studies and communal initiatives in such environments, and the lessons learned and insight gained from these endeavors are provided as examples and inspiration for this chapter. Some of the expected benefits of cyber smart communities include confidence in trading and systems used, resilient and sustainable local businesses and entrepreneurships, and cost savings from optimizing use of resources; improved private, public, and government services and interaction for citizens; better streams of data to improve decision-making; and the opportunity to attract technology-savvy members and businesses within a smart community (Kehoe et al., 2011; Silva et al., 2018; Allen et al., 2020). The rest of this chapter presents cyber smart communities and their significance, then the cyber smart community role players, which is followed by the cyber smart community building approaches. The cyber smart community challenges are discussed before the conclusion of this chapter.