August 12th meeting on the new forum

#1

We had a zoom meeting on the new forum attended by Jay Cincotta, Keith Edmonds, Parker Friedland, David Hinds, William Waugh, and Sara Wolk.

The board members in attendance voted unanimously to adopt the name Voting Theory Forum and the URL VotingTheory.com (Sara abstained and supports the decision).

The board members in attendance voted unanimously to add William Waugh, Parker Friedland, and Jay Cincotta to the board.

William Waugh volunteered to help set up the forum (with Rob Brown if he’s willing) and possibly receive knowledge from Rob Brown on necessary skills. He also bought VotingTheory.com, VotingTheory.org, and Voting-Theory.com.

We are issuing a general call for volunteers to help with the new forum. This could include board members, moderators, etc.

Keith (amicably) resigned from the board.

If the CES forum closes before the new forum is up, then future announcements will be posted on https://www.reddit.com/r/ElectionScience/

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#2

I think it’s important to move as quickly as feasible to a setup where if one individual gets run over by a truck or the pandemic or something else, the interim council as a whole does not lose control of the domain name (and of the similar names I also grabbed). I bought them from Cheap-DomainRegistration.com. The exact punctuation of that name signifies. I believe I have seen another firm with a very similar name. Anyway, in order to grab the names before any camper might, I bought them under the same account in which I have my personal home page. So that’s not exactly good. But it’s possible to transfer control to another account. So one of us could establish an account for the council as a whole and we could share the keys among several members, to solve the vulnerabilities associated with control by a single individual. However, establishing a new account requires specifying an e-mail address, the control of which would be key to controlling the account. So, the council needs a shared e-mail address that several members could monitor. Any ideas about how to arrange that? Maybe one of the services that offer disposable e-mail addresses could have a role in solving this question.

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#3

I’d be willing to moderate the forum or potentially to help out in other ways, depending on what they are.

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#4

I looked up some ways to have a shared email. It looks like with a lot of services that can do it (Gmail, Outlook, etc.), everybody needs to have their own account with the service that has control over the shared account.

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#5

I can probably do something to help out if needed.

#6

I have set up forum@equal.vote as a group email and can put whoever we like on that email. I’ve put everyone on the Council on the email so this is an easy way to “email all” and the list can be adjusted as needed. If you are on the forum you should get a test email soon.

@equal.vote is through gmail. Obviously the email implies affiliation with Equal Vote, which does not seem like an issue seeing as we passed this motion by consensus. “Create a new autonomous forum governed by a community board and mission statement, working in coalition with Equal Vote, and linked from the Equal Vote website. (It could be linked from other websites as well.) (Consensus passed!)”

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#8

What’s your email? Would you like to be notified of the next meeting?

All: Coworking on the forum project is hosted over on the STAR Slack under the #forum channel.
starvoting.slack.com

#9

My email is bternarytau@gmail.com. I probably won’t attend the next meeting, but you can notify me if you wish.

#10

Okay thanks! Also, what’s your name?

I’ve made a list of interested people to notify of things who aren’t on the board. It’s part of the pinned post on the #forum slack over at starvoting.slack.com. If anyone else would like to be on the list please let me know. @Marylander, @Toby_Pereira, want to send me your names and emails?

This highlights a feature we should have on the new forum. An email list signup button.

#11

I’m on the board already.

#12

Sorry. What’s your name then!?

#13

I think this points to some of the problems with running this. Y’all might want to get up to speed on GFLAs (Gratuitous Four Letter Abbreviations) like CCPA and GDPR, and you might want to figure out which laws apply to the forums you are archiving.

#14

I’d prefer not to reveal my name, though I can DM it to you if it’s absolutely necessary.

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#15

I just looked that over and do not see anything of concern. We are much too small for CCPA to apply and GDPR seems very reasonable. These apply to “personal data” or PII and not to forum posts themselves, which are comments made in public, not personal data harvested.

As a best practice I would suggest that we do show the old usernames on archived posts, but delete all user records beyond that. We can delete the other login info or emails for anyone on this CES forum. If that wasn’t already done by Felix I think it can be done by Jay before the archive is uploaded into the new forum. New/old users can register at the new forum with new info or reuse their old username if they prefer.

Note that neither CES or Equal Vote has accepted or been offered any ownership over the new forum, so all individuals involved in this are acting on their own, or on behalf of the Voting Theory Forum, which is an association or informal organization at this stage.

I’m not a lawyer. If anyone has specific concerns regarding parts of these laws or articles please be specific.

#16

Felix did not provide even the mapping from user-id numbers to user names. I would like him to provide the records projected down to just those fields. I don’t know what computing platform he is used to using, but I could provide code that would do the projection based on nodejs as part of the platform.

#17

The only practical way to set up ‘group ownership’ (of, say, a web site) is to establish a (not-for-profit) corporation. I have done this myself once. You may need a lawyer. You will need an independent bookkeeper (they’re not expensive). And anybody super-reliable can be the registered agent for service of process. Don’t fall into the near-universal traps of applying for tax exemption, or using Robert’s Rules of Order. Most important is to have an active board that is not too busy or lazy to meet and form a quorum. You must write up a charter (a simple constitution). You must choose a state in which to form the entity. They all have quite different laws, fees, etc., and if any legal dispute arises you must be prepared to travel to that state. But with ‘papers’, you can operate anywhere. Every year your bookkeeper must file with the tax people, no mater how tiny the revenue. And a fee must be sent to the secretary of state. You can make it simple or very complicated for yourself.

#18

It wouldn’t happen to be something like 0 to 108 in the order that the accounts were created would it? Or perhaps 1 to 109?