Greetings-
Just a quick post to suggest an interesting report out this afternoon on the TechPresident blog.  The move to consolidate the efforts of Civic Commons (home of Open311.org) and Code For America (CfA), notwithstanding the likely trigger being Civic Common’s leader, Nick Grossman moving on, actually makes sense to us.  CfA’s  Jennifer Pahlka’s write up [...]

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So, we have a phrase we like to use around here borrowed from the legal academic world.  Used to describe an action or conduct in analyzing a nuance in tort negligence, is the phrase “frolic and detour.”  I am taking a bit of detour and frolicking in an increasingly noisy element of explaining the complexity [...]

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In a recent posting, I recalled the old-fashioned traditional proprietary-IT-think of vendors leveraging their proprietary data for their customers, and contrasted that with election technology where the data is public.
In the “open data” approach, you do not need to have integrated reporting features as part of a voting system or election management system. Instead, you [...]

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You’ll often find the term “open source” here, used to describe either the source code for software, or the license that allows you take that source code and use it. But “open data” is just as important. A recent New York Times article read almost like I would have said it, starting with “It’s not [...]

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Some of you have heard the rumors and rumblings. Yes, an exciting new project in our open source elections technology framework is in the works.  And yes, it is an important tool for the front lines of democracy: election polling places.
We’ll have a  bunch more to officially say about our digital poll book project shortly.
But [...]

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As Greg said in his New Year’s posting, we’ve been planning a variety of activities for 2011, and reflecting on what we did in 2010, much that remains to do, and to do better. But at the risk of boring you with a laundry list, I wanted to provide some additional detail on some of [...]

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Gentle Readers:
This is a long article/posting.  Under any other circumstance it would be just too long.
There has been much written regarding the public evaluation and testing of the District of Columbia’s Overseas “Digital Vote-by-Mail” Service (the D.C.’s label).  And there has been an equal amount of comment and speculation about technology supplied to the District [...]

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A couple of weeks ago I presented at OSCON and during the conference had an opportunity to sit down with Mac Slocum, Managing Editor for the O’Reilly Radar.  We had about a half an hour conversation, for which we covered ~20 minutes of it on camera.  You can find it here if you want to [...]

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One of our Executive Directors, Gregory Miller, had the opportunity to attend the O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Conference this week in my home town of Portland, Oregon (his too, in fact).  Summer is in full swing here, although no major heat waves so far; we’ve been enjoying cool morning marine layer followed by a pleasant [...]

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Kudos to the Washington Post’s Rob Pegoraro for his article “D.C. launches test of open-source online voting” — fine coverage, but with a title that I disagree with in terminology only. I don’t view the D.C. pilot as “online voting” but rather as a test of an additional form of digital transport for return of [...]

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