[OSGeo-Discuss] Voting process (Re: OSGeo Membership and/or upcoming elections)

Jeff McKenna jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com
Fri May 16 08:06:06 PDT 2014


Hi Jorge,

I am very appreciative for you championing this.

I did some digging and found a discussion thread from last year on the
Foundations mailing list, of what some other Open Source orgs use for
voting software.   Some highlights:

-   Condorcet Internet Voting Service (used by the OpenMRS community):
http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/ (but relies on rankings)

- Apache Software Foundation started to create their own voting project
("steve"), but it seems not ready (it appears to be python-based, but my
brain can't make sense of it at all): http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/steve/

- maybe this is the most interesting, the Open Source Initiative used
"evote" (https://github.com/mdipierro/evote), will paste the full email
from OSI:

****
At the Open Source Initiative, we just used E-Vote to conduct a member
election, and I was pretty happy with the process (I was the admin):

  https://elections.opensource.org/

We contracted with E-Vote's author, Massimo DiPierro, to set it up for
us, which he did a fine job of.  I expect we'll continue to use it.

It does use people's email addresses to send them their ballots, but the
ballots themselves are anonymous.  (Technically, the election admin
could use database access to figure out who did what, I suppose, but
that's the only point of trust; the election itself can be verified by
others without anyone's identities or votes being revealed.)
****

...but I'm confused of evote's explanation of open vs closed ballots.

Do any of these options look interesting to you??

-jeff







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