On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 12:30, Jan Ainali <ainali....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just wanted to note that UI of SecurePoll caused problem in the board > election too, and that the same excuse was used then "in a short time once". > Obviously this is a piece of infrastructure that we need in the movement > and that any team doing one election should not need to fix the software > for it. > > Hence, a specific project, unrelated to any election, should be tasked to > solve this by the Wikimedia Foundation. And it should start soon to avoid > us finding ourselves in the same problem when the next election is being > called. > You're definitely right about that. SecurePoll is a mess. I was the product lead for a project to improve it in 2014, and whilst we did manage to make quite a few improvements to the functionality and management, we only got a fraction done of what we wanted to, the tool is still sorely deficient. There's documentation about the project <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SecurePoll_2014_Redesign>, if you're interested. I'm not surprised that WMF leadership is very reluctant to improve it, and if I were in their shoes, I'd be avoiding it, especially since none of the people involved in the 2014 project work at the WMF anymore. I think we need to get over the "not invested here" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here> tendency when it comes to running elections, and research to see if there's a good third-party solution. I suspect we'd actually save money using a third-party solution compared to trying to improve SecurePoll. I've not done a competitive analysis, so I don't know what sorts of things are available, and maybe there aren't any. But, at least, we should look. Dan
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