The OSDV Foundation supports several different projects.
The TrustTheVote Project
TrustTheVote™ (TTV) is the flagship project of the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV) for its mission to re-invent how America votes in a digital democracy. The TTV project has an ambitious and aggressive roadmap, schedule, and projected deliverables that can be “seen, touched, and tried”.
The project is driven by a unique collaboration between States’ elections officials driving requirements, and a Silicon Valley based team of senior technologists building Federally certifiable solutions for States and local election jurisdictions to freely adopt and implement.
The project has a mandate to make demonstrative progress by the 2010 mid-term national elections, delivering applicable, actionable, and useful results for some of the “choke points” that currently exist in the efficient running of elections with current proprietary solutions. These areas the Foundation seeks to impact by 2010 include: voter registration, ballot design, ballot tabulation and auditing.
The TTV project is a digital public works project, creating freely available, open source technology that is maintained as a public trust. Open source technology and practices are a key aspect of this public works project, and a critical ingredient to ensure transparency and trust.
The OSDV will seek U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) certification of these tools. The OSDV is focusing on design and development of a demonstration digital voting service that meets or exceeds the guidelines, specifications, and potential standards for high assurance voting systems. 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 resulting guidelines and a fully functional demonstration high assurance digital voting 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 polling or elections.
OSDV’s approach to transparency is to be an enabler for “open government” in U.S. elections, a first-ever demonstration that election technology can capture all the details of all the digital processes of election, and publish these details so that the public can see exactly what public servants are doing in pursuit of the public’s business of operating elections.
See the TrustTheVote Project Web site for further details.
The Technology Repository Project
OSDV intends to offer code for release from the Technology Trust Repository systems as they are completed. The four primary scheduled releases are the voter registration system, the ballot design studio, the ballot cast & count platform, and the election management system. Each will be available under either a public or commercial license.
Prior to release, work product is cultivated using a ”request for comments” (RFC) process with a memorandum published by the TTV Technology Development Team members and their associates (CoreTeam) describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the architecture of the next generation voting system technology platform under development.
Through the TrustTheVote Project, engineers and computer scientists within the CoreTeam, the extended volunteer virtual developer community, and even in some cases the Design Congress (DesCon) may draft and publish discourse in the form of an RFC, either for peer review or simply to convey new concepts, information, or even (occasionally) voting systems humor.
RFCs are initially developed as DRAFTS and upon submission and preliminary review, the RFC Editor (usually the CTO of the CoreTeam or designate) will assign a unique serial number of the form ### (see RFC 001). The RFC.### will remain labeled as DRAFT until the review process has concluded and then will either be assigned “Draft Standard RFC (as RFC.###.DS) or simply RFC.###.
Once assigned a number and published, an RFC is never rescinded or modified; if the document requires amendments, the authors publish a revised document. Therefore, some RFCs supersede others; the superseded RFCs are said to be deprecated, obsolete, or even “obsoleted” (sic). Together, the serialized RFCs compose a continuous historical record of the evolution of open source voting systems and technology draft standards and practices.
The TTV Core Team, after n-number of iterations of appropriate discourse and refinement then may choose to adopt a proposal published as RFCs as an OSDV Foundation Draft Standard to be added into the OSDV Voting Technology Repository Public Trust.
Note that the term RFC is not unique to this series. Several other organizations have published documents using the term RFC. However, the IETF RFCs are by far the best-known RFC series on the Internet.
The RFC production process differs from the standardization process of formal standards organizations such as ISO. Internet technology experts may submit an Internet Draft without support from an external institution. Standards-track RFCs are published with approval from the IETF, and are usually produced by experts participating in working groups, which first publish an Internet Draft. This approach facilitates initial rounds of peer review before documents mature into RFCs.
The goal of the TTV RFC process is similar to the IETF’s RFC system, and is to produce pragmatic, experience-driven (from prototyping or design processes) authorship. And it has an important advantage over more formal, committee-driven process typical of ISO and national standards bodies in that it emphasizes development of specifications in an agile environment which emphasizes cycle-time and prototyping.
TTV RFCs should use a common set of terms such as “MUST” and “NOT RECOMMENDED” (as defined by RFC 005 “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels” and equivalent to IETF RFC 2119). Optionally, at the CoreTeams determination, RFCs may adopt Augmented Backus–Naur Form as a metalanguage, and simple text-based formatting, in order to keep the RFCs consistent and easy to understand (to be defined by RFC.### “Augmented BNF for Syntax Specifications” and equivalent to IETF RFC 5234).
The official source for TrustTheVote RFCs on the World Wide Web is the RFC Editor Site at OSDV.org (wiki.osdv.org/RFC_Editor). One may retrieve almost any individual, published RFC, say, RFC.100 via a URL in the form of the following example: http://www.osdv.org/rfc/rfc100.txt
Every RFC is submitted as plain ASCII text and is published in that form, but may also be available in other formats (PDF or rich text HTML within the Wiki under the RFC_Editor). However, as of 2009 the definitive version of any standards-track open source digital voting technology specification is the ASCII version available in the archives at www.osdv.org/rfc.
For easy access to the metadata of an RFC, including abstract, keywords, author(s), publication date, errata, status, and especially later updates, the RFC Editor site at the Wiki offers a search form to access Wiki Pages for the RFC in question and/or its definitive ASCII version int he RFC repository.
Once published as a DRAFT STANDARD, it will a permanent entry in the OSDV Foundation Voting Technology Repository Public Trust. Each entry in the Repository will be a page containing link points to the RFC itself, its “legislative history,” any related documents, discussion threads, blog postings, or other content, as well a references into the source tree for actual reference implementation software code or hardware design data.
