Archive for the 'politics' Category

Get Involved: TrustTheVote.org

Published on February 16, 2009 in opensource and politics. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Government is something we often consider something we really can’t get involved in as average citizens outside of public office. But with the recent grass roots campaign that President Obama orchestrated, it goes to show that we as citizens do have the ability to affect influence in government. One of the major steps in creating a more open government is establishing a standardized set of guidelines and rules for digital voting in our country.

Recently at the OSU Open Source Lab, we’ve been in talking with the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) with hopes that we can help host some of their sites and infrastructure. What and who exactly are they? They’re a non-partisan and non-profit organization based in Silicon Valley that strives to try and fix many of the issues that we face today in digital voting. They have three primary goals.

  1. Resolving the root causes for the problems that exist in voting technology today,
  2. Developing guidelines for assessing, testing, and verifying whether an existing or new digital voting device, system, or service is truly high assurance and high veracity, and
  3. Defining, designing, and building a reference implementation of an open source high assurance digital voting system and service.

Excited? Interested in learning more? Live in the Portland, Oregon area? You’re in luck! The OSL and Portland Open Source Entrepreneurs (POSSE) is hosting an event at Cubespace this Wednesday from 6-8PM with a presentation by the OSDV founders. Their presentation will:

  • Introduce the project, its motivation, founding, and development efforts to date
  • Walk through the TrustTheVote technology road map and review major projects underway
  • Discuss development philosophies and approaches including experience-driven design and test-driven agile development
  • Review opportunities for systems architects, software developers, SDQA/test specialists, and user experience designers
  • Cover plans to expand the volunteer developer teams, future opportunities for senior members of technical staff, and opportunities for you to get involved

Get Involved! See you there!

A new era has begun

Published on January 21, 2009 in politics. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Yesterday was the inauguration of President Barack Obama, our next President of the United States.  Its so refreshing say that! I’m thrilled to see change in our government with progressive ideas. While I’m interested in seeing the important issues that plague our nation get resolved, I’m also interested to see how our new President will utilize information technology, specifically the use of open source. Throughout his campaign, it was known that he uses several open source technologies such as Apache and PHP for his main website and as well as change.gov. Its refreshing to know that he’s keen on realizing how important technology is on improving the nation. His first step was updating and improving the whitehouse.gov website by including a blog and several RSS feeds. While a minor detail, I think it’ll become very important in the years to come for his administration.

The grass roots campaign he ran was incredible and proved that the power of a community of people is powerful. The nature of his campaign acted almost like an open source project in the sense that it was a group of volunteers that had a very specific goal. CNN even noticed that correlation on election night by mentioning The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay describing the open source theology.

I can’t wait to see if Obama will do anything that would help promote and support open source in government and beyond. I’m very interested obviously because that’s what I do with my job, but I also feel that its important to help save tax payers money. I’d be ecstatic if his administration noticed what we’re doing here at the OSL and would help us out, but that’s a pretty far fetched dream. I have a feeling that he has far more important tasks to worry about, but one can dream.

Congrats President Barack Obama, you’ve proved to all of us that with determination and planning, anything is possible!