I’m hoping to use tech cafe at GridAKL for a daytime discussion soon looking at: Wednesday 28 September 11:30am-3pm (TO BE CONFIRMED)
Subscribe to Blogletter to stay updated
Hackathon on The Awaken Direct Democracy App awaken.guru
Meet the creator Tom Atkinson, check out the Tech Cafe at GridAKL!
Objectives:
– get some other top-level programmers onboard (ideally at least 1 or 2)
– get a group of interns who wish to learn to code via the project onboard
– do some quick and dirty setups, signups, experiments
– high level chat about how online voting can practically work in NZ
– see who wants to help with graphics, admin etc.
– see if it’s possible to come to agreement on some core concepts like revokable votes and why they are useful
I’ll put up a Meetup.com page shortly and link it here. ###NeedsEdit
– install the app server environment of contributors laptops
– discuss everybodies preferred technology stack (doesn’t have to be node, maybe “Go” would be nice for the high performance crypto parts?)
– generally set everyone up, mail list, google docs, github, etc
– fire up an oauth login with google/facebook with view to use realme later
– fire up rootstock libraries and look at what democracy code is avail already out there
– talk about creating a pegged currency exchange 1:1 that rides the NZD, perhaps call it Zilands or ZLN, with small transaction fees used to pay for costs of system
– talk about the core values: revokable votes, voting on all bills past, current and future, the design of
– legislation design, and the operation of parliament would remain untouched potentially for many many years, I’m thinking 5 to 20 years; this system will need to mirror it in parallel
– the need for paper based audits / print outs
– cryptographic structure: election commission keys, independant observers keys, personal keys, electorate keys, there will be a lot of public/private key pairs spread around. need to handle these being lost/destroyed/stolen gracefully
– observers can see the vote contents, quantity, timing; but not the identity of the voters
– voters can see their own votes due to ownership of their own private keys
– voters private keys are generated on their own machine and never transmitted out
– government signs voters keys via realme session
– observer sees the unknown voter vote; the government does not see the contents of the vote but does see the citizen ID
– overall the system can do real-time sums = total up all the votes for preliminary result
– the final result is inspected and signed off using a special set of federated keys – spread geographically amongst trusted holders such as justice of the peace etc; the final signing of the election result can be verified by a sub-set of the guardians keys, in case guardian keys are destroyed or lost it is still possible to unlock the result to see it.
– observers guarantee the truth of each polling booth
– everybody can see results down to the polling booth detail
– voters can watch the polling booth totals publicly increase fractions of a second after voting
– voters vote in privacy
– and ideally do some coding too!