The National Conference of State Legislatures Policy and Election Technology conference opened last evening and carries on today with a full agenda  The purpose is to provide lawmakers and others with accurate, objective information on policy choices relating to the changing field of elections technology--provided by a faculty that includes the nation's luminaries in the field.

NCSL graciously extended an invitation for us to participate, and our Chief Development Officer, Gregory Miller, will do so this afternoon on a Panel specifically addressing the Impact of Legislation on election systems: design, cost and life span.  The panel is full of vendors, where of course we are not a vendor of any kind but a non profit research, development, and education organization focused on election technology innovation.

Moderator: Doug Chapin, University of Minnesota
Participants:
Steve Trout, Clear Ballot
Monica Crane Childers, Democracy Works
Kathy Rogers, ES&S
Lori Steele Contorer, Everyone Counts
Joe Kiniry, Galois
Eddie Perez, Hart Intercivic
Greg Miller, OSET Foundation
Jonathan Brill, Scytl

In this discussion we, likely along with Galois, will carry the lantern for:

1. creating genuine innovation opportunity;
2. providing publicly owned infrastructure;
3. applying principles of open source; and 
4. catalyzing a healthy a commercial delivery market.  

We think that is the recipe to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes.
If you are not aware of the NCSL, you should take a few minutes to get to know this important organization.  We're big fans of theirs.  They're serving a vital role in educating and informing State legislatures and  offices of State Secretaries throughout the nation on many issues and topics. One of their major areas is election administration, including process, systems, and technology innovations.  Among other things besides conferences, NCSL publishes great content including a monthly newsletter.  NCSL maintains a blog and will be posting about the Conference, or you can follow them on Twitter through the hashtag #NCSLelections and we too, will try to post about activities during the conference (@OSET).

The Conference organizers provided us with a set of questions months ago in advance of this conference which we answered in detail.  Today we make that document publicly available for download here.