[OpenID] What election?

David Recordon drecordon at sixapart.com
Sun Dec 7 22:23:09 UTC 2008


It would be fairly trivial to provide a list of eligible members to  
vote, though I'm unsure about the privacy implications and if the  
Foundation got permission to publicly list members.  Seems like this  
is something we should add to your profile "List me as a member of the  
Foundation" and then use this to build out a page of both individual  
and corporate members.

--David

On Dec 7, 2008, at 1:14 PM, Scott Kveton wrote:

>> Right. These questions are still not answered:
>> 1. Is there a list of OpenID-s who are eligible to vote.
>
> The membership committee would be best to answer that.  David?
>
>> 2. Is the election open or closed.
>
> I'm not sure what you're referring to here.  Can you elaborate on what
> you mean by 'open' or 'closed'?
>
>> 3. Where are the 'votes' kept, who counts them.
>
> The votes are kept in the election software that was written
> specifically for this purpose.  I'm in the midst of getting public SVN
> access available for folks but we're going to need to sanitize some of
> the configuration options out (like login information to PayPal,
> Blinksale, etc).
>
>> Instead of a private software development effort, why not use Jyte  
>> for the
>> open election process? Here's why:
>>
>> 1. Everybody with an OpenID (which seems to be the form and pre- 
>> requisite
>> for foundation membership anyway) can nominate themselves or  
>> somebody else.
>> (claims such as "http://martin.paljak.pri.ee for OpenID board").  
>> This way
>> anyone could nominate a participant (a feature not available  
>> currently)
>> 2. Everybody with an OpenID could cast a "vote" and share their  
>> comments.
>> 3. On the election day, all casted votes on these claims are  
>> exported,
>> filtered by the (openly available) list of people eligible to vote
>> (foundation members) and counted.
>> 4. Transparency is perfect, everybody could review and verify the  
>> outcome of
>> the election.
>
> There are several reasons for not using Jyte for something like this.
>
> 1. I don't believe Jyte will let us do this kind of voting; its thumbs
> up or down.  I suppose we could make N claims where each claim is a
> nomination for one individual but then what do thumbs down votes
> represent, etc?
> 2. We have already built software that does what we need it to do.
> 3. There is research that suggests having real time data on the status
> of an on-going election will actually affect the outcome of the
> election.  I don't know if that's good or bad but its something to
> consider.  I imagine this has something to do with what you refer to
> above around 'open' v. 'closed' elections.
>
>> I would understand if the foundation process would be more formal,  
>> where all
>> members would need to have been accepted by (board) meetings and a
>> requirement to have a paper trail of those decisions etc. But  
>> currently this
>> seems to be a very OpenID/$25 based process where it could really  
>> remain
>> 'lightweight and web based'.
>
> I think we're accomplishing the above assuming we can get good answers
> to the questions you've posed (which I think we're well on our way to
> doing).
>
> - Scott
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