Electronic Voting

Until 2013 elections were a completely manual process. For the 2014 elections we intend to introduce an Electronic Voting process to automize some of the tasks involved. The effort will be lead by Bart van den Eijnden.

Requirements

• Nomination data is maintained on a server
• Candidates from the nomination list are automatically transfered / copied / referenced by the elections form
• Charter Members maintain their own data (email address, postal address, land of birth and/or residence (this needs to be clarified))
• Charter Members vote by logging into the system and filling out an electronic form.
• Charter members receive a notification of their vote by mail (content stripped / clarify)
• The CRO oversees the process
• Individual election results are not public

Implementation

The technology used for the elections is a Lime Survey instance hosted by UC Davis.

• Access url: https://survey.des.ucdavis.edu/osgeo/
• Software maintained by UC Davis staff
• Isolated instance for OSGeo, not shared database with other organizations
• Currently (2014) administered by Jorge Sanz with Alex Mandel and Jeff McKenna as backups.
• It will store minimal Charter Members data (name, e-mail) to allow send them notifications and updates.
• Main features
  • 28 question types
  • Validation
  • Open surveys or closed and only available to selected groups
  • It can register ballot metadata (timestamps and IP)
  • Generates reports in HTML/CSV/PDF/etc.

Some of the requirements are not fulfilled by this system:

• The nominees is not automatically transferred from our wiki
  • Minor problem, it's usually a short list
• If we want to keep things simple (avoid creating users to everyone), the CRO (or the Survey admins) will have to maintain the Charter Members database
  • Major problem, before the elections we will have to send a confirmation mail (we can do this with the system) but also announce it on the lists to assure everyone is aware of this system and ask them to notify the CRO about non working e-mail addresses or whatever.

Members

• Bart van den Eijnden (Lead)
• Michael Gerlek (past CRO, OSGeo Secretary)
• Arnulf Christl (past CRO)
• Jorge Sanz
• NN implementer
• NN maintainer
• NN (OSGeo Secretary)