Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

turning upside down or inside out...
does this mean that you got official notification that as of 1st of january 2013 NOKIA will shut down

• the Maemo.org site
• repositories
• all the dev infrastructure

?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

any news about Friday's Council meeting?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Minutes should be posted tomorrow. If you'd like to read the raw logs, they're always available on-line.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

thank you!
i quickly overflew the minutes but didn't see when the next meeting will be...
i was travelling (end of) last week so couldn't attend.
if i know the next schedule ahead of time i would like to try and log in.
also would like to discuss my "decentralized" idea about "survival" less to convince others then maybe get advice on how to proceed.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

As noted a few times already in this thread, Council holds weekly meetings on FreeNode, #maemo-meeting every Friday at 18:00UTC.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Hi council, we received an update from SD69 that there's a possibility that the voting mechanism may not be available for the coding competition after all. Although it's really worrying news, we appreciate the notice and hopefully we'll have a contingency in place if we need it. That Plan B would most likely be based around forum polls, and it would require council help and assistance from Reggie. Could you take a glance over my reply in the competition thread and let us know your thoughts? Also please let us know if there's anything that could be problematic with this approach.

Thanks for your assistance, much appreciated.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

kojacker, are You aware, that voting mechanism used for election is quite simple, open sourced, and can be hosted by anyone, using basically every basic hosting service, without additional costs?

At least it was what I remember from last election problems and discussion about it.

/Estel

// Edit

I hope that Council can help with this - running voting mechanism on other place than it was done in past, would be great practice before holding election on own infrastructure.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

For a simple voting mechanism, yes. For this particular application it's not that simple. You seem bent on this logical fallacy, so let me address it plainly:

For the Coding Competition (or Council elections, or a referendum, or any other thing where the community would vote) you need to do a lot of leg work AND have a host that's well beyond a "basic hosting service". To address this plainly, lets break this up into how the whole thing happens:

Step one is setting up the service (scripts mainly) on a site that people will trust to not have a bias, or that could be hacked or tampered with. That alone is actually a lot of work, since "the machine" is not just a simple package, but also needs a ballot created, with options and steps and all that mess. And beyond setting up the scripts, it needs to be on a site setup and maintained by a group that people will trust to not alter the election or that's easily hackable.

Step two involves generating a list of the thousands of people who are eligible to vote (via Karma, or sign up, or what have you), and sending them an e-mail with their validation token and a link to the voting machine. Most "basic hosting services" would terminate you after you sent out a few hundred e-mails with a link and a token, yet alone thousands of them. And don't say "there were only a few hundred votes in the last election!" This isn't voting; this is hanging out tokens to ALLOW people to vote. Lots of people get tokens but never vote. But by the rules of the election, they need to get those tokens.

Step three is the part we're all familiar with, where we vote, get our validation token, and the results are stored for later review. Traffic for that is pretty light, even with thousands of people voting. But the CPU and database activity would probably make most "basic hosting service" take notice, assuming they didn't have issues with you during step 2.

Step four is making the vote lists available and tallying the results, which again, can be done on just about any device. But there again, to host and make that data available to thousands of people... a "basic hosting service" may take issue with that, based on CPU (validating votes) and traffic.

Over all it's time consuming, and at the scale of thousands it limits the choice of how and where such things can be done. There are reasons the CC asked to hold the vote on Nokia's servers: They are a trusted/neutral party, that's 90% setup already, that already has a provider that won't smack them as spammers if they blast out a few thousand e-mails on a particular day to willing recipients. (Or will at least work with them if they do get detected and shutdown automatically...)

So can you please stop with this continued falsehood that hosting a vote for everything and it's grandmother is a "trivial" thing, when clearly that is not at all the case?

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

Bylaws proposal has been published.

Everyone please, take a few minutes to read it carefully and provide your feedback in that thread.

Re: [Council] Ask the Council!
 

First of all, i don't think that people would have trust issues with *any* hosting service, that Coding Competition leaders would decide to choose. After all, it's *not8 organized by Council, so no trust issues (pun intended ;) )

As for the rest, nice long post, but X-Fade (as someone who ensured last election) seems to not share Your opinion. He presented it clearly in bug report about last voting.
---

It's all less important that question which follows, though:

What are You - as a chair (responsible for handling votes) - proposing, to resolve Coding Competition concerns about voting, that was supposed to be handled by council's election mechanism?

It's all we need, not n A4 pages of explanation, why You're right and others are wrong. Stick to the merit, please.

/Estel