Welcome!
The Open Source Digital Voting (OSDV) Foundation is a pending non-profit California public benefits corporation conceived in December 2006 and officially filed in April 2007 to serve as a supporting organization for a collection of open source digital voting technology projects.
The purpose of the Foundation is to provide support and protection for the development of the specifications, draft standards, and reference implementations of high assurance, high veracity digital voting technology. We are modeled after similar non profit organizations, such as the Mozilla Foundation.
This short introduction to OSDV consists of our 5 goals and 2 kinds of demonstrable results, supplemented by FAQs and an overview of the background, problem statement, and solution approach.
Goals and Objectives
The Foundation has the following five goals:
- Provide clear, neutral, and sustainable public ownership of design specifications, request for comments documentation, draft standards, software code, hardware architecture, patents, and other intellectual properties and domains.
- Establish an accountable and transparent decision-making structure for the essential activities of the Foundation.
- Promote activities designed to help grow the OSDV “movement” – “Lectio Reformo” – our call for election reform in general, and specifically to re-invent how technology empowers and protects the cornerstone of democracy: every U.S. citizen’s vote.
- Advance the free adoption of the OSDV technology standards, and the SHARP technology framework.
- Solicit additional funding and public participation in order to continue the work of the Foundation.
These goals have been translated into a formal mission statement complete with the formal language of a mission statement, but then we think it warrants that and offers some spark of inspiration for all of us, as does our evolving manifesto. But for the most part, the summary below should give you enough flavor.
Summary
The OSDV addresses a serious problem in voting technology: the lack of technical guidelines and specifications for determining truly high assurance, high veracity voting devices and services.
The results of the OSDV work -- derived from a volunteer meritocratic community of open source technologists and policy geeks -- are intended to be:
1. Draft standard specifications for the design and development of digital voting technology. For this work, the OSDV will seek U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) recognition at least, and certification at best, of these specifications; and
2. Design and development of a demonstration digital voting service that uses high assurance voting system "reference implementations" which meet the draft standard guidelines, specifications, and potential assessment standards to be developed in parallel. A key part of this work is applying high assurance principles to open-source development, or "T-Spec" as we refer to this unique combination approach.
The OSDV operates under an open source mandate. For us this means that all work is done through a collaborative, open volunteer community to ensure complete transparency, public review, comment and participation, producing royalty-free publicly available results.
We think the OSDV can be a breakthrough organization bringing together the best and brightest in technology and policy into a synergistic, meritocratic community focused on designing and developing guidelines and specifications for high assurance digital voting services.
The resulting draft standard specifications and a fully functional demonstration service will be freely adoptable as an educational tool, test-bed, and even a production ready service for organizations wishing to utilize the capabilities for (at least) private polling or elections.
More: Overview with Background, Problem, and Solution
