poll.opensolaris.org Help
Voting prerequisites
At a minimum, you must have a valid opensolaris.org account to participate in any poll. (Specific polls may require Contributor or Core Contributor status from a Community Group.) If you do not have an account, sign up to acquire one.
1. Provide one or more SSH public keys
To vote in the polling system, you will have to provide at least one Secure Shell (SSH) public key in your opensolaris.org user profile. Read the detailed instructions on SSH key submission to opensolaris.org.
Reminder:// A key update takes up to five minutes to propagate to the polling system.
2. Review your contributor grants
At poll.opensolaris.org, an up-to-date roster of current Contributor and Core Contributor grants is displayed under the "Grants" tab. Each of the upcoming polls on the system is identified with a specific Community Group or the Entire Community. The minimum Contributor Grant rank required for the poll then refers to a grant made by the Community Group in question or, in the case of a poll over the Entire Community, a grant made by any Community Group. For example, Governing Board elections are open to Core Contributors across the Entire Community.
If, after reviewing your set of Contributor Grants, you believe that your status with a particular Community Group is inadequate, please follow up with the Core Contributors of that Community Group. Be prepared to identify the form your contributions have taken. If that interaction fails, you may petition the current Governing Board, by private communication with a Board Member or via cab-discuss. You will definitely need supporting documentation to make a successful petition.
3. Know your polling host
The SSH key fingerprints for poll.opensolaris.org are
1024 69:1d:b4:1d:ce:20:bf:b6:fd:e3:48:be:82:e1:8c:7b poll.opensolaris.org 1024 d7:79:d6:01:be:ef:29:c3:68:62:7b:d2:bd:91:02:d2 poll.opensolaris.org
corresponding to these public keys. You may choose to add these to your SSH known hosts in advance of connecting to the server.
Electronic voting
Below we provide a sample transcript of an interaction with the polling system, for Joseph C. Contributor, with user ID, jccont, a Core Contributor to the fictional Community Group.
$ ssh poll.opensolaris.org -l jccont opensolaris.org Vote Recorder (poll) You may enter "help" or "quit" at any prompt. Links to further instructions are provided at http://poll.opensolaris.org/ USER: Joseph C. Contributor (jccont) GRANT: CORE CONTRIBUTOR, fictional, expiring Fri Feb 13 01:43:50 2009
The poll application is displaying your OpenSolaris ID, followed by a listing of your currently active contributor grants. Note that you connect using your OpenSolaris ID--it would also be valid to use ssh jccont@poll.opensolaris.org in our example. This listing allows you to verify that your contributor status is correctly recorded by the polling system.
Following that, the system lists the open polls for which you qualify and in which you have not voted. If you are only qualified for a single poll, the system will immediately place you into the response process for that poll. (Remember: you can type "quit" at any point.)
POLLS: 1 - Coffee (1 question), closes Sun Feb 25 16:00:00 2007 PST [#1] 2 - Friday responsibilities (1 question), closes Sat Feb 24 17:00:00 2007 PST [#2] Enter your selected poll ~--> 1
With the selection made, the question-response portion of the selected poll begins. The polling system first displays the question, followed by a randomized list of answers. (My apologies for a Menlo Park-centric example.)
POLL 1: Coffee
Choose where we should have coffee
QUESTION 1.1: ("Coffee choice") Near coffee or far coffee?
1 - Near coffee ('Peet's')
2 - Far coffee ('Starbucks')
This question is being resolved by single transferable vote. Please enter
a space separated list of your candidates, ordered by preference. You
may omit candidates.
RESPONSE 1.1 ~--> 1
We enter a single entry vote, since it's been a long afternoon and a quick beverage would be the best choice.
Because this question is a single transferable vote-resolved question, we could have responded "1 2", "2 1", "1", or "2" as legitimate ballots.
VERIFY: Your ballot is: Coffee choice: [Peet's ] COMMIT BALLOT (y/n) ~--> y RECORDED: ballot 5e54119bbc8d0f17b2d149cba177e2f61c1afc43 on "Coffee" from Joseph C. Contributor
The system then displays your ballot. In the case of multiple questions, a list of "question : [ response ]" strings would be presented as our ballot summary. If correct, then enter "y" at the commit prompt; the hex string in the recorded line is a token representing your unique ballot. You may abandon your ballot and start over by entering any other value (including "quit", of course).
At this point, the system will either return you to an updated open poll listing, or log you out, depending on whether you have additional polls available.
Here's the transcript again in full.
$ ssh poll.opensolaris.org
opensolaris.org Vote Recorder (poll)
You may enter "help" or "quit" at any prompt. Links to further
instructions are provided at http://poll.opensolaris.org/
USER: Joseph C. Contributor (jccont)
GRANT: CORE CONTRIBUTOR, fictional, expiring Fri Feb 13 01:43:50 2009
POLLS:
1 - Coffee (1 question), closes Sun Feb 25 16:00:00 2007 PST [#1]
2 - Friday responsibilities (1 question), closes Sat Feb 24 17:00:00 2007 PST [#2]
Enter your selected poll ~--> 1
POLL 1: Coffee
Choose where we should have coffee
QUESTION 1.1: ("Coffee choice") Near coffee or far coffee?
1 - Near coffee ('Peet's')
2 - Far coffee ('Starbucks')
This question is being resolved by single transferable vote. Please enter
a space separated list of your candidates, ordered by preference. You
may omit candidates.
RESPONSE 1.1 ~--> 1
VERIFY: Your ballot is:
Coffee choice: [Peet's ]
COMMIT BALLOT (y/n) ~--> y
RECORDED: ballot 5e54119bbc8d0f17b2d149cba177e2f61c1afc43 on "Coffee"
from Joseph C. Contributor
References
The draft Constitution stipulates that election for Governing Board seats shall be resolved via the Meek Variant of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) algorithm. STV-based elections are preferred for their fairness, and are also used by other Open Source communities for their Board elections, such as the Apache Software Foundation and the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA).
- Single Transferable Vote, from Wikipedia.
- Annotated tabulation of the LOPSA 2005 Board Election, explaining the progression of the STV algorithm as fractional votes are redistributed after elections and eliminations.
- OpenSTV, a Python-based Single Transferable Voting implementation.