On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 at 10:10, Dan Garry (Deskana) <djgwiki@gmail.com> wrote:

You're definitely right about that. SecurePoll is a mess. I was the product lead for a project to improve it in 2014, and whilst we did manage to make quite a few improvements to the functionality and management, we only got a fraction done of what we wanted to, the tool is still sorely deficient. There's documentation about the project, if you're interested. I'm not surprised that WMF leadership is very reluctant to improve it, and if I were in their shoes, I'd be avoiding it, especially since none of the people involved in the 2014 project work at the WMF anymore.

I think we need to get over the "not invested here" tendency when it comes to running elections, and research to see if there's a good third-party solution. I suspect we'd actually save money using a third-party solution compared to trying to improve SecurePoll. I've not done a competitive analysis, so I don't know what sorts of things are available, and maybe there aren't any. But, at least, we should look.

Or, scope out designing a lightweight tool hosted on Toolforge or similar infrastructure, that integrates with the wikis and other data sources via the API, rather than actually being a MediaWiki extension. So many of the things that SecurePoll does (voter eligibility list generation, authentication, vote collection and collation, etc.) can be done using API integrations or data dumps; there's nothing instrinsic to it that requires it to be a MediaWiki extension, it was only done that way because that's the way we did everything back when. Developing a tool like that on Toolforge is so much easier and less complex than developing a MediaWiki extension. There's so many successful examples of this way of doing things; pageviews.toolforge.org is a good example.

(Sorry for the follow-up email spam, the thought occurred to me as soon as I hit send.)

Dan