Last Week at OpenElections

(source: money.cnn.com)

Last week was an eventful one for OpenElections: We tapped into a brain trust of election data experts, got amazing feeback on v1 of our results format, and designed a bit of swag for our volunteers :)

On Tuesday Derek and Serdar presented OpenElections to IEEE’s P1622 working group, a collection of deeply knowledgeable and passionate election data experts from the public and private sectors.

The group is working to create a common data standard for all voting machines (starting with the US, but also internationally). Very exciting stuff.

We’re fortunate that the P1622 group is enthusiastic about OpenElections. Numerous members have offered to share technical expertise as we embark on our process of gathering certified results from past elections. They’ve swelled the ranks of our Google Group in the last week, helping to spark robust discussion about our first election results spec. And they’ve shared amazingly detailed suggestions for improvements. Derek plans to incorporate many of their ideas into an updated results spec (stay tuned for a blogpost later this week).  Meantime, additional feedback is most welcome!

Also, this week, we scheduled our first metadata gathering sprint for April 27, 10am-1pm PDT/1-4pm EDT (more coming on this shortly). And, most importantly, we finalized the design for our OpenElections T-shirt. It comes in mens, and curvy girly sizes.

Join our metadata sprint and you too can have one! Email us to learn more.