Re: GNOME Foundation elections!

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rusty Conover <rconover zootweb com> writes: 
> If the election is done via a mailing list on gnome.org will there
> have to be an election body that determines validity of voters and
> resolves any disputes about the election? 

Probably a good idea; I can think of two options:
 a) current steering committee does this, with disputes also 
    getting discussed on this list
 b) we come up with a group of people who aren't on a slate to 
    do it

I would vote for a) with the caveat that members would have to excuse
themselves from any issue that they had an interest in, e.g. if they
are on a slate that's involved in a dispute. The problem with b) is
that most of the people likely to volunteer to do political-type stuff
may well be on a slate, and we wouldn't have the election body during
the nomination period, and we have no good process to select the group
of people.

> The only issues that I see
> with this is making sure that the email received is from the real
> person, and technical issues, say gnome.org crashes during the middle
> of the voting period and people don't know if their vote got recorded
> or not.  The election oversight group can provide direction during
> these events.  Also we are assuming gnome.org is a trustable host,
> which I believe that it is but people who are paranoid might not.
> 

What kinds of vulnerabilities are you thinking of when you say
"trustable host"? Of course gnome.org is secure to the best of our
knowledge, but if you want cryptographic guarantees or the like, it
probably isn't.

I think the main security we'll have is a manual cross-check of the
vote mails vs. the membership list, and members looking at their own
mail in the archives to be sure it's the same as what they sent.
We'll post the vote-count script here, so anyone can run it and verify
results and the script's correctness. This is what I mean by public
ballot simplifying everything, it really makes it easier to be sure
nothing funny is going on...

Havoc