launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

["Francis J. Lacoste" <francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12-02-20 09:01 AM, Matthew Revell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Last week I spent some time chatting with Laura Czajkowski about the
> team polls issue. I also opened a discussion on the mailing list used by
> the various councils in the Ubuntu community, to better understand their
> needs.
> 
> Here's the Launchpad side: we want to remove polls from Launchpad
> because they are hard to use, they are limited in their functionality
> and, quite frankly, they don't justify their maintenance cost.
> 
> Why don't we just fix them? Well, external services do a better job and
> polls are a non-core feature for Launchpad. The time we have to work on
> Launchpad needs to be spent elsewhere.
> 
> At this stage, I think that even if someone came to us with a good plan
> for fixing polls and they were willing to do the work, I'd be doubtful
> about accepting their offer. Ultimately, the maintenance burden would
> still fall to the Canonical Launchpad team.
> 
> In reply to my email to the Ubuntu councils, Elizabeth Krumbach
> explained that one main thing stands in the way of the Ubuntu community
> permanently moving away from Launchpad team polls. When electing council
> members, all of the relevant team's members need the opportunity to
> vote. They use the CIVS service, which sends an individual link to each
> eligible vote; that let's them ensure only the eligible voters can vote
> and that there's one vote per person.
> 
> The problem is this: there's no legitimate way to contact all of a
> team's members with an individual email because some team members hide
> their email address.
> 
> I see two realistic ways in which we can fix this:
> 
>  * Either the Ubuntu councils make sharing your email address with the
> team's admins a condition of membership and we provide admins with a
> plain text download of a team's members' email addresses. In every other
> circumstance, hidden email addresses remain hidden. I think this is a
> quick-fix from our side but it's not really satisfactory socially.
> 
>  * Or people who hide their email addresses get a self-destructing email
> forwarder, again available only to the admins of the team that is
> holding a poll, that will forward email from a single email address (it
> was Daniel Holbach's for the most recent Ubuntu Community Council
> election) to their hidden address. That forwarder then becomes inactive
> when the poll is over. The team admins can download a plain text list of
> both the public addresses and these one-time forwaders in place of the
> hidden addresses. This seems like more work for us but I expect would be
> more socially acceptable.
> 
> There are arguments for and against both of these.
> 
> I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on the viability of either
> of these or other approaches.
> 

If I understand things properly, the main requirement is for the team
administrator to be able to get a list of email addresses so that they
can create a private poll on the Condorcet Internet Voting System?
(http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html)

And that's in conflict with the 'Hide email address' settings.

A third alternative would be to replace our complete 'Poll'
implementation with a simple front-end to

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/civs_create.html

Where the team admin creates the CIVS poll from Launchpad and we fill in
the email addresses when forwarding the request to CIVS?

Nice third party integration :-)

-- 
Francis J. Lacoste
francis.lacoste@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

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