Lightning Talks

Patching Democracy

A short introduction to voting advice applications and why we might not need to hack democracy
L.lightningtalks
Till Sanders
We introduce the concept of a VAA by example of the well-known German "Wahl-O-Mat" and show how to run an election compass for your hometown using the free and open source OpenElectionCompass.
A voting advice application is a great way to support elections and democracy as a whole by making the parties or candidates more transparent and comparable. The differences between political parties are often difficult to understand for the voters, especially for first-time voters. To make elections more accessible some countries have started to offer election compasses, or VAAs. Services like these help citizens getting to know the parties or candidates by presenting a carefully chosen collection of political statements. The users and the parties both take position to these statements. Based on this, voters can quickly get a comparison between their own opinions and the positions of the parties. In Germany, this service is implemented by the bpb, the Federal Agency for Civic Education and is called "Wahl-O-Mat". In the Netherlands this concept is called "Kieskompas". Software like this has developed in the early 2000s and evolved ever since. Running such a project offers great value to citizens, the political system and our democracy. It is also very expensive. Implementing an election compass is not only time consuming, but also requires great technical knowledge. Usually, there is no election compass for smaller elections, because hiring software developers is simply out of budget. OpenElectionCompass offers a free alternative – free as in free speech as well as in free beer. The requirements for a voting advice application are very similar, be it for a small or a national election, for an election in Berlin or an election in Brussels. OpenElectionCompass aims to provide a free solution, simple to configure, customize and deploy. By continuously improving our project, we have an advantage over agencies doing this only every few years. And by not developing behind closed doors, we are transparent and open for everyone. This talk will give an introduction to the concept of VAAs by different examples. It will deliver background knowledge about matching algorithms and provide hands-on guidelines on how to run your own election compass using the OpenElectionCompass. How to get started, build a team, develop statements, address parties, configure and deploy the OpenElectionCompass, attract attention and so on.

Additional information

Type lightningtalk

More sessions

2/6/21
Lightning Talks
nick black
L.lightningtalks
Notcurses is a C library (with C++, Python, and Rust wrappers) facilitating complex TUIs on modern terminal emulators. Notcurses supports vivid colors, multimedia via FFmpeg or OIIO, sane multithreading, and complex Unicode. Things can be done with Notcurses that simply can't be done with NCURSES or any other implementation of the X/Open Curses specification. I will present Notcurses's design goals, API, and some details of its implementation, which ought serve as a sufficient grounding for any ...
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
Rom
L.lightningtalks
With containers being deployed at scale on Kubernetes, there is more than ever the needs of introducing proper Secrets management to address in and out services. While there are dozens of Network related open source projects, there is not much about the art of Secrets and almost none being to be part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation landscape. This talk provides an overview of the open source state of Secrets management.
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
Vladislav Belov
L.lightningtalks
0 A.D. is a free and open-source game of ancient warfare. It is a real-time strategy game which can compete with the classics of the industry, but comes with absolutely no cost for the players. Come and discover your new favorite game! I'll present a short story about graphics of 0 A. D. Why it requires math and algorithms, why water is the most expensive thing and why the Sun is watching you.
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
Corey Stephan
L.lightningtalks
For historical research and writing, the use of a dedicated tiling window manager and other customizable FOSS tools improves efficiency. With a bit of work, manuscript facsimiles, database query tools, and other items that a historian might need to have opened simultaneously can be sorted exactly how he/she wishes, freeing crucial time from organization for proper analysis. In this presentation, I explain how to optimize a multisource historical research workflow inside a tiling window manager ...
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
Tom Payne
L.lightningtalks
chezmoi helps you manage your personal configuration files (dotfiles) across multiple diverse machines. A single public branch in a single git repo serves as the source of truth, with machine-to-machine differences and integration with your password manager handled with templates. With chezmoi you can set up your personal environment on a new machine with just two short commands, with minimal dependencies. It runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even more esoteric operating systems like ...
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
ELISEE JAFSIA
L.lightningtalks
The lack of accessible quality healthcare is one of the biggest problems in Africa and other developing countries. This is not only due to the unavailability of resources, but also to the absence of a structured formative process for the design and management of healthcare facilities. This situation strongly contributes to deepening inequalities in access to quality healthcare. Through an Open Society Foundations funded project, the Mboalab aims to remedy these inequalities by building ...
2/6/21
Lightning Talks
Cyril Hrubis
L.lightningtalks
GFXprim is a modular and minimal graphic and widget library written in plain C. The library is very close to fulfilling its goals hence it's time to present it to a wider audience. Since this is supposed to be quick lightning talk I would like to give rough overview of the library, it's modules and implemented functionality.