Stirme

S.T.I.R.M.E.—Secure Transparent Instant Representative Mesh Elections

Overview

The idea behind this project is to provide the means for an instant electronic vote that is trustable, representative and is not dependant on a central authority. Any node can serve both as a voting centre or as a voting booth. This software should be extremely easy to use so that we could target the OLPC project (but not exclusively). It could then be used as a mean of teaching about democracy as well as an actual tool that will allow any community, whether it be local (classrooms, schools) or virtual (NGO's, open source projects) to participate in any decision process.

Our current tasks include:

• Polishing up our design vision so we can:
  • Compare to similar projects.
  • Get some peer review.
  • Start writing a specification.
• Setting up our infrastructure:
  • Set up our sugar build environment.
  • Get a mailing list.
  • Start tracking the project on the development site.
  • Upload our skeleton code.
  • Request a laptop ;-)

Use Cases

• Juan is a schoolteacher and his class needs to choose a president. He creates a new election on the voting centre in his computer and invites the class to vote. He takes the opportunity to show the students the multiple ways election mechanisms can directly effect their lives.

• Pepe and a few friends see problems with the current school system. They create an election in an independent voting centre on a public server for their schoolmates where they can propose and decide in a representative way about actions they can take.

• Andrea's class breaks into an argument about how to approach a school project. They don't seem to be reaching an agreement, so Andrea quickly sets up a vote on her laptop and invites everyone to decide in a representative way.

• An open source community grows and its leader wants to open up the project for a more democratic representation. He provides the software for download on the project's page and invites the community to vote for a constitution on the project's online voting centre.

• An NGO wants volunteers around the world to decide quickly on certain course of action and it provides an online voting centre for volunteers to subscribe to.

• In the United States, this could serve as infrastructure for the proposed National Initiative constitutional amendment.

External Links

The beautiful thing about network contexts is we can share and build together. We'll be keeping external links for inspiration and collaboration.

Other projects

• Demexp - the democratic experience.

Interesting Documents

• Bibliography on e-voting papers maintained at the Department of Science System Assessment at the Rathenau Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• The center for range voting has a very inspiring piece on the voting mechanisms of social insects.