On 7 October 2014 00:57, John Mark Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:29 AM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > <snip> > > IMO the election must be run by a third party, as happened prior to > 2013, by SPI. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_in_the_Public_Interest > Adequate staff support from WMF is also needed. > > The elections have never, even once, been run by a third party. For two board elections, the voting was hosted off-site, although vote verification was still carrried out by internal volunteers (the election committee); on the last board election, to avoid the problems that arose with off-site hosting, the election key (which acts as a kill-switch for the election) was held by a third party. All the rest of the activities were done on-site by volunteers with some help from staff. All of the organization except for the hosting of votes has always been done internally. In my own post-mortem after the last election, I too suggested that the elections be hosted off-site; however, my reasoning was that it would be difficult to justify the expense of redeveloping SecurePoll sufficiently to make it straightforward enough to use given that it's only used once or twice a year. However, work has been happening on SecurePoll pretty much since the last election, so there's no benefit to hosting elsewhere, especially given the difficulties that were encountered in the past. External election hosting is a fairly big ticket item if it is being done well (and it would probably involve non-free software and as much if not more work on the part of WMF staff), although I do understand that there are certain advantages to going outside or more precisely not hosting on our own servers. Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
