[governance] Charter status update

[Avri Doria]

Hi,

I am back from my research trip and back to trying to get the charter  
approved.

I now have voting software working on igcaucus.org.  Anyone who is  
interested in the details of this software is welcome to read the  
manual available at: http://www.igcaucus.org/eVote.pdf.  The voting  
software is open source and is provided by Marilyn Davis, Ph.D. at  
http://www.deliberate.com/ .

In order to use this software, I will be setting up a new mailing  
list called IGC-voters at igcaucus.org (it wasn't possible to link it to  
the actual governance mailing list).
This list will be made up of those who were both:
- subscribed to the governance list as of 060724
- subscribed to the governance list with a individual name attached  
to the subscription.

Ironically, there is a issue with attaching personal names to the IGC- 
voters list.  Since it need to use an older version of mailman (1.13)  
it is not capable of including the subscriber's name, only the email  
address.

There is also a privacy issue with the software.  As listed in every  
ballot:

> Warnings: Although eVote will not reveal your vote to the other
> members of the voting community, the system administrator of the
> computer that stores your vote can quite easily see the voting
> records of individuals. Also, there is the possibility that your
> ballot can be seen by a "snooper", someone who intercepts your
> ballot in transit.
>
> The integrity of the poll, i.e., the accuracy of the count, is
> susceptible to being tampered with by the system administrator
> of the computer running the eVote(R)/Clerk software.
>
> Both the privacy of your vote and the integrity of the poll are
> susceptible to attack at your own computer.
>

This means that the administrator of igcaucus.org - me - has the  
ability to look at individual voting records and to tamper with the  
results.   I promise not to do this, and to only look at logs as  
necessary for system administration.  But it is up to the  
participants of the IGC whether they trust me to actually not do look  
or tamper with votes.  Of course if in the end we opt for non secret  
votes, this won't be an issue.  But if we decide to go for secret  
votes I will be bound by a promise to not look at and to not tamper  
with any of the IGC votes.  If the IGC cannot accept this personal  
guarantee, then I will ask help in finding free and open software  
that does not have this vulnerability.

There are several interesting pluses to this software.  One of its  
strongest features is that it allows anyone who is subscribed to the  
list to initiate a poll or a petition.  I think that over time the  
IGC could actually take advantage of this capability.  Setting up a  
vote is easy (once all the software and the lists are up and running)  
and it is easy to make any poll open or closed, to use a yes/no  
format or a rating 1-n format.  It is also possible to set up  
petitions as well as polls.  It is a very rich package.  It is also  
possible, I understand from my reading to work in multiple  
languages.  I have not tried this yet and don't intent to for the  
charter, but do think it would be an interesting capability to take  
advantage of later.  I would also note that the Marilyn, the author  
of the program is very helpful, so as we progress in our usage of  
advanced features, we will be able get assistance if needed.

So, unless there are objections from the caucus, i intend to populate  
the the IGC-voter's list as mentioned above.  As I subscribe people,  
they will receive a welcome message.  Since this list is being create  
as an opt-out list, I apologize in advance for anyone who is  
subscribed who does not wish to be.  And of course I invite them to  
unsubscribe.  If you know already that you do NOT wish to be  
subscribed to the IGC-voters list, please let me know off list.  I  
will let this list know when I have finished the subscription effort  
so that anyone who has not received the welcome message and who  
believes they should have, can let me know before the vote starts.

Also, since there have been no comments on the charter for the last  
several weeks, I will take 1.6 as the charter for the vote.  I will  
create the ballot in the next few days and post it for a brief sanity  
review.

If all goes well, I expect to initiate the charter vote by 27 August  
to last until 12 September.  But I have been optimistic before.

thanks
a.
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