Louis Zacharilla
Co-Founder
Intelligent Community Forum (ICF)
Louis Zacharilla is a social entrepreneur who is credited with initiating the global Intelligent Community movement. As the Co-Founder of the Intelligent Community Forum, a global think tank and foundation which studies “energized communities” for the new century, he developed the Top7 and Intelligent Community of the Year Awards program. Through the New York-based ICF, he helps community thought leaders to understand and implement the best practices of the world’s leading communities based on six criteria established in the ICF’s landmark 2001 study.
He appears regularly in the media and speaks of the need to develop more wholistic, creative and culturally relevant communities. Communications technologies, especially broadband, are fundamental to the ICF approach. He is a frequent keynote speaker and moderator at conferences and events on a range of topics related to ICF’s work. In 2012 he was one of three people in the world quoted in the influential annual Wealth Report on the world’s best cities of the future. In December 2012 he was invited to participate in the Nobel Peace Prize event dialogue on ways to create more open and free societies.
Mr. Zacharilla is the co-author of three books, Broadband Economies: Building the Community for the 21st Century, Seizing Our Destiny and B2B Without the BS. He is working on a series of blogs and essays titled “Community as Canvas.” His articles and thoughts appear regularly in publications in Canada, The Netherlands, Sweden, the United States, and Australia. He writes a regular column for Satellite Executive Briefing magazine. His work was the subject of a multi-part series in Taiwan’s Ideas Magazine in 2011 and he was recently featured in Mayors & Cities Magazine and Smart+Connected Communities. He appears in a promotional video for the City of Stockholm (ICF’s 2009 Intelligent Community of the Year.) His blogs appear in Government Technology Magazine.
Mr. Zacharilla oversees the formation of Institutes for the Study of the Intelligent Community across the globe.
Mr. Zacharilla has served as an adjunct professor at New York’s Fordham University, is a guest lecturer at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute’s School of Innovation Technology & Enterprise and recently lectured at Central European University (Budapest). He was named a judge for the French-based World E-Democracy Awards and was elected a member of the board of trustees at Walsh University (Ohio, USA). He was named by the government of Australia as a member of the New York Dialogue, a group of leaders from multi-disciplines who continue a global dialogue among the two nations. He serves as an honorary advisory board member to the Intelligent Senior Independent Living Spaces project (Canada) and is parish council member to the parish of St. Vincent Ferrer in Manhattan.
After a career in advertising, where he worked on the US Army’s “Be All You Can Be” campaign, he became a principal of Alan/Anthony, Inc., a for-profit company which manages trade associations and communities of special interest. He holds a Masters degree from the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). Louis A. Zacharilla was born in Lyons, New York and lives in Manhattan.
