The internship that I am at is likely the most unexpected of the PRIME sites. Although we were originally going to work at the Patent and Trademark Office, unfortunately that plan wasn’t able to come to fruition. Instead, I, along with three other students, have been working with NOVA Web Development, an IT business that offers web design assistance, at the Arlington Career Center. For the majority of the internship, I have been researching Helios voting, a system that provides a way to create online elections that are secure, private, and verifiable by using advanced cryptography that hides each vote until the total is tallied, meaning that deciphering an individual’s vote is virtually impossible. Although NOVA’s Helios project is in its infancy, it eventually hopes to offer assistance with it to its clients.I think it took me longer to sand it down to exactly 250 words than to write the actual essay.
Something important that this experience has taught me is that, when working a job, everything is not laid out in a perfect schedule. Here at the Career Center, my work depends on communication with other NOVA Web Development members through IRC, (Internet Relay Chat) so sometimes I have a lot of work on my plate, while at other times, whether it be because someone that I am working with is offline or has a different schedule, I am forced to look for other worthwhile projects to work on. Not only has it been a learning experience based on testing Helios and other topics that Mr. Elkner discusses with us, but I have taken home valuable workplace skills.
Today when I arrived, Mr. Elkner told me that I was going to start with virtual machines this week. At noon, he said that he's going to set it up on my computer. From what I know, we are going to use something called CiviCRM in order to bulk email voters in a Helios election, since the current server does not have that functionality. As it's not quite noon yet, I decided to check up on NOVA Web's Helios page. It seems that the HTML layout has been updated, so it now looks a bit different. In addition, it seems that an election has been created and has been featured on the front page. Four people have voted on it, however I cannot check who as each name still shows up as "User." I believe that I'm supposed to be the fifth voter, but I'll ask German when he gets online later today.
Another interesting thought that Mr. Elkner made me aware of is that there's not very good documentation about Helios, aside from, obviously, the source code, which not everyone is able to read. An interesting project might be to write some instruction for the system, but I'm not sure if I'm familiar enough with it to actually do that yet.
Ultimately, however, I think I'm ready to start writing it, however I'll need additional help along the way. Here's the link to my work so far: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hiGP8tRGXHVu6DmnlfVKjIGxE-cPzGOuG3FhQrVj7fQ/edit?usp=sharing
Congratulations, Eric, you've done it again! You have taken ownership of the problem at hand, and used initiative and creativity to find a way to move the project forward. You will do well in the world. Looking into CiviCRM was a backup plan, in case you were completely blocked on helios. Since you obviously like to write, and since you are willing to take on the initiative of starting a user manual for helios, *please* do that! Today the goal should be to get the 6 of us and German into the system and to run several test elections. Take good notes, and modify the manual you have started to reflect what you learn. Then let's ask someone else (I would be an ideal choice ;-) to create an election using only your manual as a guide.
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