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).
