Today, I'm working at home for the whole day. Since I have not really investigated NOVA's Helios server, I will do more of that today. Something that's great about Helios is that the whole program is open source, (its GitHub is linked directly on its website) meaning that it most likely wasn't too difficult for Mr. Elkner's more experienced students to host a new Helios server. As I stated in an earlier blog post, I'm an Admin on this server, so I can do a bit more prodding than I could on the vanilla Helios server.
Right now, what I'm noticing is that even though I signed in with my Google account, my name doesn't actually show up. I'm just called "User" for some reason. After creating yet another test election, this is what my name shows up as again after voting. I'm not sure, but it seems as though this might go against an important aspect of Helios itself- there's not a way to see whose names appear on the voter registry. It seems to me that this might have something to do with the fact that facebook login has been removed, and Google is the only option available. However, this may not be a problem depending on what configurations you use, if you supply your own voters then it does not matter.
In addition, something else I noticed is that an error message is received when emailing voters in a public election. This is a bit stranger than the other one, and I'm not really sure what might cause it. I spent all of today experimenting with aspects such as this, but the IRC channel seems to be pretty inactive right now so I'm going to have to wait until next week to get some better advice than I can coke up with.
Helios is indeed free software. NOVA Web Development is committed to software freedom, so we would not be looking into it were it not. That said, helios documentation is almost completely non-existent (we have the source code, of course, but we are not that good :-( and the community around it is small.
ReplyDelete