elected officials and staff up for ridicule and immediately gets the project off on the wrong foot.

At a news conference in Blacksburg last September, Congressman Rick Boucher, as well as a private consulting company announced a new communication service called Blacksburg Alert. Blacksburg Alert is a technology solution powered by the consultant’s first responder emergency notification software. After 9/11, an immediate and heightened level of concern about Homeland Security surfaced. At this time, Blacksburg officials were inventing a new, efficient, and highly reliable tool for communicating in times of crisis, and on a day to day basis.

Blacksburg Alert embodies the notion of “proactive communications” and represents the next major advancement in electronic government services. With the proliferation of self serve government, Blacksburg Alert is one of the first multichannel local government initiatives to allow the public not only to subscribe to the subject matter that means the most to them, but to decide how they wish to receive their information. Many of the early listservs we’re all familiar with are PC oriented and simply don’t address the digital divide issues that local governments face. Multichannel eGovernment, also known as convergent technology, means that the same electronic service is available to all residents all the time, helping us to mitigate the issues of the digital divide. In this situation it’s easy to say, what’s good for the citizen is also good for the locality.