Selectricity
What is Selectricity? What might my community want to use it for?
Selectricity is "voting machinery for the masses." It consists of a suite of tools to allow groups of people to make decisions through voting. While most voting projects are geared to government based decision-making, Selectricity aims to apply election method of voting research created for governments toward every day decisions (e.g., where should we go to dinner or who should be officers of a campus club). The system emphasizes preferential decision-making, cryptographic means of voter verifiability, and algorithmically complex election methods.
Small group decisions are pervasive and persistent. Imagine the following scenario:
- A group of friends needs to select a restaurant for a meeting. The group has strong, divergent feelings: half the group loves Chinese food but hates Mexican; half loves Mexican food but hates Chinese; everyone thinks Italian would be a good option. A simple voting will never select the Italian restaurant because it has the least votes. Forgoing a voting system altogether will usually result in a decision by the loudest in the group or the first person to speak up.
Using preferential election methods, Selectricity can help these groups makes better decisions quickly and easily. Of course, Selectricity is not limited to mundane decisions --- it has been used both to schedule meeting times, poll friends on the name of a child, and elect non-profit boards of directors.
Selectricity current includes the following different modules:
- Selectricity QuickVotes: Simple, quick web-based elections. A QuickVote can be created in under 1 minute by a user with no experience with Selectricity. Voters usually vote in under 30 seconds during their first experience with the system.
- RubyVote: A library that incorporates the algorithmically complex parts of election method. This makes it possible for software developers with their own applications to simple add advanced voting machinery and better election technology into their application.
- Selectricity Anywhere: A simple SMS and mobile phone-based interface to Selectricity that allows users to create, vote, and view results entirely from a normal non-Smart mobile phone.
Is it ready for communities to use? At what stage of development is it?
Selectricity is currently under active development and new features are added each month. That said, currently released features have already seen thousands of users of a variety of types.
Code is available, under a free software/open source license in a source code repository here. Released features are listed above.
Features under testing include:
- Selectricity Full Elections: A more sophisticated interface to to the voting machinery more suitable to more organized Election. These election can have voter rolls, anonymous and voter verifiable ballots, and more detailed feedback.
- Selectricity Embeddable Election: We are currently testing a version of Selectricity that allows users to simply embed elections onto their own websites or blogs. Additionally, it allows users to upload custom themes so that the look and feel more closely matches their own communities web-presence.
Has it been tested in a community? Where, exactly, and what was learned?
QuickVotes have been used by thousands of individuals and groups for a variety of different decisions. Many users have used the system to select meeting times.
Full elections, currently unreleased but being tested, have been used by several communities including the non-profit's Students for Free Culture and Sugar Labs to elect their boards of directors. We are currently in conversations with NYU about running the University student government elections.
How can people get started adapting this tool to their own communities?
Information on adapting the tools is available in the following documentation file:
Many users have already contributed patches and functionality. For example, several new election methods (i.e., different ways of counting votes) have been contributed to RubyVote by volunteers and users who loved Selectricity but had a "pet" method that was, at the time, unsupported.
Whom can they approach for more information about this tool?
More information on Selectricity is available on this wiki page and on the Selectricity Blog. Additionally, users can email team@selectricity.org with bug reports, feedback, or with questions.
