The EU is launching a 30 million euro initiative that focuses on rural smart communities. The initiative includes two large-scale pilot projects that offer the opportunity to extend Minimal Interoperability Mechanisms (MIM) to rural smart communities. The new projects will provide a universal approach to developing, procuring, and deploying Internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled services for smart and rural communities. The themes of the two pilots are 'AURORAL: Architecture for Unified Regional and Open digital ecosystems for Smart Communities and wider Rural Areas Large-scale application' and 'dRURAL: The service marketplace for European rural areas'.