Making Elections Data Open Data: The Sequel
Today, members of the Core Team are in Vail, Colorado at the IACREOT Conference to unveil the next phase of VoteStream, the elections results and reporting subsystem of our Open Source Election Technology Framework. This is an awesome day, and we owe a great deal of thanks to the Knight Foundation for continuing to support this important part of the Framework.
While we didn't make the cut with the Knight NewsChallenge for Ballot.ly* this year, Knight's commitment to VoteStream remains unwavering. So today, we officially kick-off the development effort which is slated to include a dozen election jurisdictions participation in this "Beta" cycle for VoteStream (or "VoteStream 2"). To be sure, we've been in background engineering work for several weeks, ramping up for a sneak-peek at the new performance and participation capabilities that will start to become available with VoteStream 2.
We will be blogging regularly about progress and developments. And that will commence here, but move over to our soon-to-launch version 3.0 of our TrustTheVote Project web site (a separate home for the actual work of the Project apart from the Foundation's web site here.) Wait a minute, I think we just dropped a subtle soft announcement wrapped in a larger one there :-)
To start that chronicling of the VoteStream 2 project, later today we will post presentation materials from today's announcement. For the moment, we want to point out that VoteStream completely embraces and is (we humbly assert) one of the best implementations of the IEEE 1622.2 open election data standard (more to say about that later). And we kick off today, announcing Beta evaluation and testing participation of jurisdictions in Texas, Minnesota, and Ohio, with more to announce shortly.
VoteStream is a service to be available for local deployment in elections jurisdictions, or made available as a hosted service across the cloud (more to say about that soon too). And what we think is the best part: with a strong API we intend that VoteStream will be available for anyone to write any kind of election results information or analysis App. (And yes, more about that soon as well.)
Again, we want to express our appreciation for the thought leadership of the Knight Foundation in recognizing that innovation in elections technology requires supporting more than research, papers, and gatherings, but the actual development of software that people can see, touch, and try. Knight simply "gets" what we've shown to be true:
Code Causes Change
* We notice sometimes the Ballot.ly URL is not resolving across all DNS servers. If it fails for you, you can always peruse our application.
