Revisit number forty two hundred

[Rod Clark]

> 1.  SCN Board and volunteers will make it a top priority to conduct
> the business of the organization on-line. ...

Barb, 

   Could you go have a look at the Grex (Ann Arbor) community
network's online Co-op Conference and see what you think? Some of
it's pretty interesting. If you hit Item List, the most recent
discussion threads are at the bottom of the page.

   http://www.cyberspace.org/cgi-bin/bt/pistachio/confhome?conf=coop

> A. On line voting and registration systems should be implemented,
> including methods of maintaining privacy of votes while verifying
> participant identity.

   The voting program that we currently have works, but it's
only for public (e.g. committee) votes and not for secret
balloting. It also isn't entirely easy to set up and use. Some
of the stumbling blocks are:

- Who can vote on a given committee's activities? There still
isn't a good list of current volunteers, although that's
improving lately, and is likely to get notably better pretty
soon. The program reads a voters file of SCN usernames in a
committee's directory, to see who's eligible to vote.

- Each voter currently must have an SCN account, because the
voting program asks the voter to login with an SCN username and
password in order to use the voting program. We can't check
passwords on remote systems like Hotmail, for people who use
(say) someone at hotmail.com addresses.

- To set up an online vote with the existing voting program, you
have to know how to edit and revise an HTML form. This is more
like "data processing" than "drag and drop." Some radio buttons
have to be renamed with meaningful names for each vote, like
"1-Reorganization" and "2-Redesign," to avoid confusing (say)
"Item1" and "Item2" from one vote with those from another vote,
in the voting results files. It's not yet possible for every
volunteer to do this effortlessly, because of geeky stuff like
making sure that the form works right.

   Well, anyway. More later.

Rod Clark

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