[Fsfe-ie] ideas for fs promotion for world domination or was that the social good of humanity

Joseph Kiniry kiniry at acm.org
Tue Jun 13 00:53:06 CEST 2006


Hi Paul et al,

On 28 May, 2006, at 17:21, Paul O'Malley wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind there are cogs rotating and
> now and again I have ideas. Today seems to be one of those days.
>
> It struck me that there are several things that we could do within  
> Ireland.
>
> There are several machines not being used by the government, these are
> mostly the evoting machines.
> If anyone can publish pros and cons for each of these we might  
> manage to
> get together a few salient thoughts and make proposals to the  
> people who
> hold in their hands the ability to make things happen.
>
> It occurs to me that the evoting machines were a and continue to be a
> waste of resources. This should be rectified.
> They could be used for public good, or reassigned roles where they  
> could
> run free software, the task may not be as hard as it seems.
>
> The politics and work of getting them out of cold storage, stripped
> down, and ready for action is something that we need to consider in
> considering and of the suggestions below.
>
> So the ideas are as follows:
>
> 1) Provide them to the UN as part of our annual contribution, the
> calculation is not of interest to me now however this would be a
> proposed use, there is a need when disasters strike worldwide to  
> provide
> databases of information in a fashion that those who wish to  
> contribute
> to aid relief need to be able to coordinate their data.
> The core of the suggestion is that there be an international database
> with suitable locale font features enabled.
> It would provide a large scale clustered "web interface" to assist
> manage any disaster.
> A wiki or blog with some serious modifications, to track and identify
> people places and materials damaged by such a disaster, none the  
> less a
> large scale database running free software.
>
> 2) Attach them to the national grid of computing resources for
> scientific research.
>
> 3) Run distributed number crunching for "approved" charitable  
> projects.
>
> 4) Maintain the status quo
>
> 5) Anyone with alternative ideas.
>
> There you go just to get the ball rolling.The only condition of the  
> proposal from perspective should only run free software.
>
> IFSO's role would be to provide assistance to assist any such a  
> proposal into life.
>
> Regards,
>
> Paul O'Malley

If you want to get behind something like this, then lets get behind  
the world on FLOSS electronic and internet voting going on here at UCD.

Our work is all based upon the KOA system from NL that I have worked  
on for a few years, it is all GPL, we are working on a new all-FLOSS  
release this Summer, we have applied formal methods to various  
critical parts of the system, and we are now working on an e-voting  
midlet for mobiles.

In the longer term I could even see integrating the KOA work with the  
Nedap machines, effectively replacing the SPOS (Steaming Pile of  
Sh*t) that is the PowerVote software.

Alan Morkan, CCed, is leading this work and can provide more  
information.

Best,
Joe
---
Joseph Kiniry
School of Computer Science and Informatics
UCD Dublin
http://secure.ucd.ie/
http://srg.cs.ucd.ie/






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