Re: Elections

[Vincent Untz <vincent vuntz net>]

Le mardi 21 octobre 2003, a 04:34, Glynn Foster a ecrit :
> Hey guys,
>
> We were just discussing the elections at a recent board call,
> particularly with respect to the dates and the voting mechanism, so
> we're all on the same page.
>
> Can you please resend the proposed calendar of the elections again. I
> think I remember something holding the announcement of the dates - what
> was this again?

Here it is:

    October 2003
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
          1  2  3  4
 5  6  7  8  9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23(24)25   list of candidates opened (24th)
26 27 28 29 30(31)     applications/renewals closed for elections (31st)

    November 2003
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
                   1
 2 (3) 4  5  6 (7) 8   ask people what questions they want the
                       candidates to answer (use gnomedesktop.org) (3rd)
                       all candidates must be announced (7th), questions
                       to be sent to the candidates are choosed (7th)
 9(10)11 12 13 14 15   announce list of candidates running for election,
                       questions emailed to all candidates (10th)
16 17 18 19 20(21)22   ballots go out (21st)
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30

    December 2003
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
    1  2  3  4 (5) 6   all ballots must be returned (5th)
 7 (8) 9 10 11 12 13   preliminary election result announced (8th)
14 15 16 17 18(19)20   challenges to election results close (19th)
21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31

In the case of a tie, there's another round of votes starting December
8th and ending December 15th.

I've mailed stro and je's ok for the gnomedesktop.org stuff. Telsa will
select the 10 best questions after one week.

You're right about something holding the announcement: I need to verify
that every member is subscribed to foundation-announce so every member
will receive all the important informations. I wanted to do this today,
but I was too busy with real life. I'll try to do everything tomorrow.

If you have any comment on the calendar, please, please, tell me
quickly, before I announce it.

> Also, obviously we want to be as transparent as possible with the voting
> mechanism. Can you give us a technical description of what you guys are
> planning?

I assume this is about anonymous voting (if it's not, this will work
like last year, and I can tell you how it works if you want).

I posted this sometimes ago, and got no real feedback:
        * we send a mail with a unique key to each member.
        * the members go to a webpage where they'll vote. To vote, they
          need to enter their key and choose up to 11 candidates.
        * the script sends the vote to vote gnome org and, if the member
          has specified an e-mail address, bcc the mail to this address.
          This way, the mail will be anonymous and archived.
        * people can override their vote if they want by returning to
          the webpage.

The big question is how to make the unique key. I think this will be
something like a number from 001 to current number of members (~370),
followed by a hash of the e-mail address and of the name (with some
random seed). When sending the ballot to the member, we save the key in
a file so we have a list of all the valid keys. But we do not store who
is associated to a key (so it will really be anonymous).
Oh, yes: of course, we will send the ballots to the members in a random
order, so it won't be possible to say the key 001xxx is the key of the
first member.

I see two possible problems here:
        * it's not possible for someone to toggle an option "I don't
          want my vote to be anonymous but I want it to be public" because
          we can not verify which member has a given key. So voting will
          really be anonymous.
        * if someone does not receive his key, then... Well, we'll need
          to send every member a new key because we won't know the key
          for this member.

First problem might not be a big deal. The second one is more
problematic.

Here's an idea which can workaround the second problem, but makes the
thing a bit more complex:
        * we send a password to every member
        * members go to a webpage where they enter this password. We can
          identify the members with the password.
        * the webpage shows a unique key, calculated like above. The key
          is stored in a file, without any information linking it to the
          member. The member is marked as "having received a key", and
          so he won't be able to ask for a new key.

It'd be really great to have some comments or other ideas on how to do
anonymous voting.

Thanks

Vincent

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas presses.