Can our party pick your brain?

[Michael Allan]

Rohan Jayasekera wrote:
> Michael, if I understand correctly, you're saying that there is no
> need to choose right now between "party" and "no party" approaches,
> and that Votorola and Transparency Party people should just work
> together on getting a vote going in some riding on one or more
> issues.  Is that correct?

Thomas von der Elbe wrote:
> Yes, I am more and more beginning to see it like this too. Party or
> no party doesn't actually matter right now. What matters most is
> that we together actually start to vote on a particular and well
> chosen issue.

Yes, since Thomas wants to.  But I can only speak for myself, not
Votorola.  The #1 priority is that we continue working together (our
small crew).  #2 is to give the tools a good workout, without which
development stalls (see below).  So I think anyone who can move on 2
without sacrificing 1 is going to lead the development forward.

Rohan Jayasekera wrote:
> Simplicity is key when introducing new things to people, so I
> suggest that the initial issue(s) be ones that are already well
> understood.  Also, since only a small percentage of people will be
> (a) contactable by us and (b) willing to be "early adopters", we
> will need a fairly large population to draw from in order to get
> enough initial participants to bootstrap from.  I suspect that a
> single riding will be too small.  Perhaps all ridings in one city
> could be covered (Toronto seems to me the obvious choice), so that
> in the early days when we don't have meaningful numbers in any one
> riding we can still have meaningful totals for the city, and
> publicizing those via city- level media will attract additional
> participation in each riding.  (City-level media can include social
> media: tweeters often assume that the reader is in the same city and
> when that's untrue it's accepted and forgiven.) ...

Technically we can handle any size/shape of jurisdiction, and just
about any issue.  So that's all open.

Just to be sure: the early adopters (b) won't have beta-quality tools
to work with.  The tools are functional, but not always easy to use,
full of features, beautiful to look at, etc.  We won't be able to fix
that till the users confirm that all the essential pieces are in
place.  (We need the walls, wiring and plumbing installed before we
can hang the wallpaper, decorations, and so forth.)

Thomas von der Elbe wrote:
> One question remains open for me though: is it good enough, if the
> vote-server runs under Mikes domain? People will want to have some
> security that their votes and work will not be lost. I always
> pictured some organizational structure which would garantee this. Is
> there another way? If no, what priority does it have?

If the only concern is data loss, then I think we have a solution
already.  The backup is stored here:
http://zelea.com/system/host/havoc/var/cache/votorola/v/
Someone just has to copy it to an independent site every so often, and
we'll be fairly safe.

Later, when we implement results verification, every verifier will
have the ability to recreate a vote-server from scratch.  Meantime,
the source code is here: http://zelea.com/var/db/repo/votorola/
Copy that too, and we're pretty well covered.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 416-699-9528
http://zelea.com/