[Sugar-devel] Open Voting Activity?

Sebastian Silva sebastian at fuentelibre.org
Mon Dec 15 20:47:38 EST 2008


I'm downloading the ISO now. What use case did you have in mind?
In 2007, Ignacio Vergara and me took a go at writing a Voting
activity. Back then, we hit several walls [1] and did not make it, but
it was a powerful learning experience and the catalyst for my coming
to Peru get involved in the deployment.
Being here, I've found other areas to help out, but it still is a
dream of mine (and I guess many others) to have one secure,
de-centralized voting machine per family.

I'm cc'ing Ignacio on this. Perhaps we take it up again.
Perhaps the easiest way to do it is to use the social network to
submit signed ballots that can later be verified, instead of my
fantastic-but-problematic P2P vote broadcasting idea (no "counting"
central authority required, each node counts).

Another problem that affected my attempt, was the user interface
design. I wanted it to be as close to Sugar as possible, yet providing
a modern voting mechanism (originally I intended Schwartz, but later
I'm leaning towards range voting).

My final idea for the UI, was to vote with little stars, like it is
already common in websites. You'd star (say, 10 stars) each option,
and then sign the ballot and submit.
On deadline, or all votes cast, you'd see the results of the calculation.

Of course this implied also an "option designer" had to be made, and a
mechanism for publishing each election - so the idea is you'd launch
the Activity, design your election, share it, then perhaps even cast
your vote, wait for results.

I'm guessing by sidestepping the ambitious goal of pure de-centralized
P2P and end to end encryption, then its fruit much lower hanging. We
can add all of that later.

Thanks for bringing it up, I hope I can move it forward again.

Sebastian

2008/12/15 Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com>:
> Source code for the Open Voting Consortium demo conducted at Linux
> World Expo in August is available in a git repository. See
>
> http://www.fossfactory.org/project/p61
>
> I would like to make this available for use in school elections within
> Sugar. Is anybody interested in taking this on? The demo is in Python.
> It needs Sugarizing, of course. I don't see a need for collaboration
> during the voting process, unless perhaps for assisting the disabled.
>
> Normally this software produces printed ballots (human- and
> machine-readable, with security features in the bar code) for later
> counting. I'm sure it could be modified to create PDFs instead.
>
> There is also a LiveCD image of an earlier version of the system.
> http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/blog/2008-apr-08/new_ovc_demo_disk_ready_to_show
>
> I am a Founding Member of OVC.
> --
> Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
> And Children are my nation.
> The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai
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-- 
Sebastian Silva
Iniciativa FuenteLibre
http://blog.sebastiansilva.com/

[1] (had problems with jhbuild, didn't figure telepathy out + bad
communication)
           http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Stirme

There's also Mako's excellent http://selectricity.org/


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