On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 at 12:30, Jan Ainali <ainali.jan@gmail.com> wrote:

I just wanted to note that UI of SecurePoll caused problem in the board election too, and that the same excuse was used then "in a short time once". Obviously this is a piece of infrastructure that we need in the movement and that any team doing one election should not need to fix the software for it.

Hence, a specific project, unrelated to any election, should be tasked to solve this by the Wikimedia Foundation. And it should start soon to avoid us finding ourselves in the same problem when the next election is being called.

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.

Dan