[governance] Charter status update

[Jeremy Shtern]

Hi Avri and Everyone,

I, for one, am comfortable with the potential privacy risks associated 
with the voting software and with expressing trust in Avri's judgement 
as a honest broker in having access to the results- at the very least 
for the charter vote.

Thanks again Avri,

Cheers,

Jeremy Shtern



Avri Doria wrote:
> 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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