IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

An AP story on Yahoo News this morning discusses how emergency alert emails from local government leaders in Indian River County, Florida, are blocked by AOL as spam. Indian River County, which happens to be one county south of where I grew up, implemented an emergency email system to get the word out to local residents when things such as mandatory hurricane evacuations go into effect. Over 4,000 residents subscribe to the service. The only problem is that AOL's servers list the county's emergency coordinator email address as spam; so whenever he tried to send out an emergency alert, residents who happened to be AOL users didn't get the memo. AOL says it's now working on a way to let the messages through. I should certainly hope so. I often write about "e-government for all" -- the idea of ensuring that online government services are accessible to all constituents, no matter their education level, economic situation or disability. Too often, it seems, government agencies don't implement simple communication mechanisms that can reach the public in a timely manner. In this case, the government had the right idea, but concerns over spam treated the messages as if they were porn or Cialis advertisements.

Governments should work closely with communications companies to ensure that emergency emails and text messages get through to the public as intended. There's no excuse for people not knowing to get out of harm's way just because an ISP's anti-spam software wasn't smart enough to recognize a legitimate emergency communication from a legitimate official source. We may want to explore creating the digital equivalent of an emergency broadcast system. Just like TV broadcasts can be automatically pre-empted in times of emergency, similar emergency messages should be able to get out to email and SMS text users in a prompt fashion, while at the same time guaranteeing that the system can't be exploited for nefarious purposes....

Autor: Andy Carvin

Quelle: Digital Divide Network, 02.05.2005