[OpenID] What election?

[Scott Kveton]

> 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