[heroes] Re: [election-officials] Helios voting platform
Hi openSUSE friends, I'm looking at alternatives for replacing Fedora's home-grown elections app with something I don't need to get our infra team to work on. I asked the election officials and they suggested I ask here. How well does Helios work for you? Did you evaluate other options? Thanks, BC -- Ben Cotton Fedora Program Manager TZ=America/Indiana/Indianapolis -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: heroes+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: heroes+owner@opensuse.org
Hi Ben, Am Montag, 11. Februar 2019, 22:54:48 CET schrieb Ben Cotton:
I'm looking at alternatives for replacing Fedora's home-grown elections app with something I don't need to get our infra team to work on. I asked the election officials and they suggested I ask here. How well does Helios work for you? Did you evaluate other options?
I helped with the Helios setup last year, so I can at least answer some of your questions ;-) Before using Helios, we used polls in Elgg (on connect.opensuse.org), but it started to do funny things[tm] that made it unusable and untrustable (no idea why exactly it broke, but we got reports of candidates listed twice etc.). I also remember that because of that breakage, surveymonkey was used for an election, and a quick home-grown solution for another one. I wasn't involved in choosing Helios, and don't know if other alternatives were considered and/or tested. (Maybe Theo knows more and can answer that part?) Regarding Helios: It has a few rough edges (for example celeryd crashes if it looses its database connection [1]), but once you mastered these things (hint: auto-restart celeryd in its .service file) Helios just works :-) and has options for everything you'll need in an election. The documentation is not perfect, but it's good enough to get Helios up and running, and to find out how to setup and run an election. I managed to integrate the admin / election creator login with our login proxy (not really hard once you understand what you need to do), but voters (which you create by importing a CSV file) get a separate username and password that is only valid for one election. One important thing is that Helios stores all the votes encrypted (AFAIK they get encrypted in the browser before being submitted) and allows each voter to verify that his/her vote was stored and later counted correctly. To sum it up: I can recommend Helios. Maybe there's another solution out there that is even better, but I never searched for it - and given how good Helios works for us, I probably won't do such a search ;-) If you are interested in testing Helios, I can offer to - give you a test account so that you can setup a test election (after the board election is finished - I won't touch the server until then) - send you a "manual" with everything you need to know about creating and running an election - send you our salt code that includes everything you need to setup Helios (well, except the database details ;-) - send you a VM with openSUSE Leap 42.3 [2] and Helios running (auto- created by our salt code - PostgreSQL server not included, that would be another VM) - actually, we could even host the Fedora elections, so if you aren't uncomfortable with sending the Fedora members to elections.opensuse.org, that might be the easiest way for you ;-) Regards, Christian Boltz [1] which reminds me that I should re-test that with the latest version, and report it as a bug if it still happens. [2] updating to Leap 15 is on my TODO list, but - after the board election is finished, and after finishing some other things on my TODO list --
Anyway, what does our mission statement say? "Have a lot of fun..." [> Per Jessen and Greg KH in opensuse-factory]
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participants (2)
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Ben Cotton
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Christian Boltz