[ZF] re: electronic voting application

[Tres Seaver]

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Rob Page wrote:
> Hi Jonathan:
> 
> On Mar 24, 2006, at 5:55 PM, Jonathan Hobbs wrote:
>> Congratulations on the Zope Foundation Incorporation!
> 
> Thanks!
> 
>> We have an application which could be used to handle
>> voting (and its even based on Zope!) which you could
>> use if you like.  You can have a look at it at
>> www.neopodium.com
>>
>> It was designed to be a low-bandwith (ie. to support
>> dial up users) teleconference support tool (allows
>> multiple attendees to view presentation slides under
>> the control of a central 'presenter').  The system
>> also has a feature to allow 'in-presentation' voting.
>> Have a look at the 'How It Works' slide show for a
>> quick overview.
>>
>> If you think this could be of use let me know!
> 
> I gather from the demonstration that everyone would
> have to attend the same "virtual meeting" (and,
> possibly, concurrently).
> 
> We need the voting to be possible over some time period
> (e.g., a week or ten days).  Does you application allow
> for that?  Thanks!

Hmmm, I wonder if we aren't over-engineering the problem here?

What if we made it a requirement that all voting members of the
foundation submit (and keep current) their GPG/PGP public keys with
their application (fingerprint plus key server URL would do), and then
that they sign all vote e-mail with that signature?  The secretary could
then compile a keyring (even make it downloadable from the ZF site!)
which could be used to validate voting e-mail.

For board votes, this should be *way* more than sufficient (a dozen or
so members, voting by mail a dozen or so times per year).  The board
elections would be the only ones which had enough votes to make
remembering to check the signature at all tedious.


Trss.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 202-558-7113          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
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