[liberationtech] EarthHQ, EveryVote, Partystarter, TopVideoTimeline - Liberation technology projects for improving public knowledge and participation

[Eduardo Robles Elvira]

On 12/03/14 01:45, Mitch Downey wrote:
> Hi LibTech,
> 
> I'm a UX designer and developer working on a few open source liberation
> technology projects. Please email me if you would like to learn more, have
> feedback, or may want to get involved in any of the projects below. I would
> especially like to connect with college students who could be interested in
> designing and/or developing these tools together for college credit, and
> professors who may want to integrate one or more of the following into a
> class project.
> 
> *EarthHQ* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/135/> - aka Earth the RPG
> (role-playing game): turn our only home and species into a RPG character
> and SimCity-style game, with health bars and interactive maps displaying
> human quality of life indicators based on aggregated scholarly data.
> Eventually we would like to provide not only easy-to-read data, but also
> facilitate actions for users to help address each need globally or locally.
> 
> *EveryVote <http://mitchdowney.com/items/139/> *- Online election and
> townhall meeting platform. Hold a verified election and debate online for
> free. The MVP is designed to assist with the 10,000+ university student
> elections held worldwide each year. It would be relatively easy to hold
> *verified *online elections for university student elections because most
> colleges provide each student with a unique email address. Our plan is to
> finish the beta this summer, in time for Fall 2014 (Spring 2014 if you're
> south of the equator) university elections.
> 
> *Partystarter* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/42/> - Create and manage a
> political party online. To save time/energy, Partystarter can be built on
> the same open source backbone as EveryVote (this backbone would be like a
> Wordpress for civic engagement tools). I started designing Partystarter in
> response to a blog post by Krist Novoselic of Nirvana and
> FairVote<http://kristnovoselic.blogspot.com/2013/12/open-source-party-part-ii.html>,
> where he called for the creation of an "Open Source Party" that uses online
> direct democracy tools to decide on party platforms and elect
> representatives.
> 
> *TopVideoTimeline* <http://mitchdowney.com/items/138/> - Automatically
> generate a video timeline based on keywords, hash tags, and view count
> data. This would be a fascinating and insightful tool for browsing the most
> seen videos of recent protests and historical events. Imagine automatically
> generated video timelines that tell the story of the Arab Spring, Kiev, the
> civil war in Syria, Anonymous, Occupy, etc. through the most popular
> internet videos from that time. Ideally videos could be sorted not only by
> the date they were published, but also by which videos were most seen on
> each day. If the video API data needed to power this tool is already
> publicly available, this would be a simple tool to create.
> 
> Each of these projects will be open source (AGPLv3), will comply to and
> help develop open standards, will be 100% financially transparent (except
> possibly TopVideoTimeline), will abide to ethical user data and privacy
> practices, and should make its features federation-compatible wherever
> possible in order to prevent a monopoly on these public services from
> forming.
> 
> Any questions, feedback, or interest in collaborating would be appreciated.
> You can email me mitch [at] everyvote [dot] org. I can also be reached on
> Twitter @m_downey <https://www.twitter.com/m_downey>, and here's my Github
> profile <http://github.com/themitchuation>.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> Mitch Downey

Hello Mitch:

That's all good but.. have you thought about security? In AgoraVoting
[0] we take that as really important. That's we use elgamal reencryption
mixnets with multiple election authorities, with encrypted ballots etc.
And security, we have to continue improving it [2], we just lack resources..

I see that you are also using Django just as we do because you left the
DEBUG mode on [1] I and reached a 404 page :-P Be careful, and maybe we
should talk and collaborate.

Regards,
--
[0] http://agoravoting.com/
[1] http://www.everyvote.org/opengovfed/
[2]
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9562/agora-voting-proposes-bitcoin-based-voting-system/
-- 
Eduardo Robles Elvira, +34 668 824 393, https://agoravoting.com