[Sugar-devel] Open Voting Activity?

Edward Cherlin echerlin at gmail.com
Mon Dec 15 21:16:11 EST 2008


On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:47 PM, Sebastian Silva
<sebastian at fuentelibre.org> wrote:
> I'm downloading the ISO now. What use case did you have in mind?

School elections, village elections, whatever the community wants.

> 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).

We support all commonly used voting systems, including ranked
preference, instant runoff, M of N, and many more. I was not thinking
of using the Sugar interface during the voting process, since this is
self-contained. No toolbars, no collaboration, no tabs.

> 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.

We can handle that.

> 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.

A ballot design program with a decent UI is included in the source,
but is not on the LiveCD. Ballot design would have to be a separate
activity.

> 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.

You can discuss that with our security people.

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

You're welcome.

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Sugar-devel mailing list
>> Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org
>> http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
>>
>
>
>
> --
> 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/
>



-- 
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


More information about the Sugar-devel mailing list