Online voting
I have an interest in on-line voting through my involvement in local government elections in New Zealand. I have started to create a collection of online voting resources.
I have put together some supplementary documentation for the Helios Voting open source online voting application.
Solid
The Solid project was initiated by Sir Tim Berners-lee, the inventor of the web. A key concept is that people keep all their personal data in a pod. In a social media context this contrasts with the current model where users’ personal data is stored centrally - the users of Facebook have their personal data - their likes, shares, comments - kept on Facebook’s servers. Under the Solid model a user might ‘like’ someone else’s post but the user’s ‘like’ is stored on the user’s own pod and the owner of the post is notified.
Some work has been done with applying these concepts to governmental settings and the use of citizens’ data by Professor Verbogh and team.
It might be interesting to apply the concepts to voting. If a voter, voting on-line, retains their vote, rather than parting with it, and simply sends a notification this might enhance the verifiability of voting. The vote can be counted again, for example. It can be counted by more than one tallier. The voter does not part with their vote and can check it anytime from any device. Some thoughts.
I have started to contribute a little to the Solid project. Some experimental apps, showing how the Solid libraries might be applied in iOS: working with tokens, using the rdflib.js library.
Speaker tracker
Rules for formal debates often include limits on speaking times and the number of times a member may speak. The chair of a meeting, or secretatial support, needs to keep a run-sheet of those who wish to speak and those who have spoken as well as time the speeches. My Speaker tracker app is an iPad and MacOS app which does this. The code is here. It is also available on the Apple app store (US, NZ) and as a desktop app on the Microsoft Store.