Who Is Doing This

Jack Waugh

The forum is controlled by a Council, which currently has four members. The forum council has not incorporated itself and so I don't know that it has a legal existence or can own anything, but the members have agreed to form it for the purpose of running the present forum. I believe I have sent the credentials for running everything to the members. Of course, the main key comprises the credentials for controlling the domain names.

I believe that applications to join the forum council would be welcome.

Currently, the council has no officers; everyone is simply a member. In particular, there is as yet no treasurer and there are no established procedures for receiving donations and paying expenses. I have been footing the bill for the server at $5/mo. and that for the domain registrations, on the order of $20 annually for each.

The current council members:

Sara Wolk
Connor Frankston
David Hinds
Jack Waugh (me)

Ms. Wolk is affiliated with equal.vote and starvoting.org and receives compensation for her work for those organizations. Ms. Wolk has been setting up the forum meetings using the Zoom conferencing service. There is no regular schedule of meetings and they have been called when any member thought there was a need to make one or more decisions. Motions are offered and seconded and formally voted on for all decisions, and minutes kept.

I am currently the only volunteer with the technical knowledge to maintain the server.

Rob Brown had the idea for the forum, and that it should use the NodeBB software. A major reason for that choice is that NodeBB is written in the Javascript computer programming language (not to be confused with Java, a different programming language). In theory, it should be possible to write code to simulate elections and add that to the forum installation. Personally, I have some doubts about how easy or difficult it may be to reverse engineer NodeBB enough to write add-ons successfully. There is some kind of abstraction layer over the database. However, it is possible to write other applications in Javascript and have them run independently; that is how I am publishing the archive.

Moderators:

Blain Cellars
Gary Lietke
Marylander
Sara Wolk

The Council members are also the admins.

Psephomancy

@Jack-Waugh said in Who Is Doing This:

In particular, there is as yet no treasurer and there are no established procedures for receiving donations and paying expenses. I have been footing the bill for the server at $5/mo. and that for the domain registrations, on the order of $20 annually for each.

I will send money as soon as this procedure is established, or can do it now if that's ok. You shouldn't be both paying for it and doing all the work.

Keith Edmonds

I can also send money once there is a way to store it (not that I really care what way that is).

Also, will Marylander remain anonymous?

Marylander

My name (David Hinds) is on my account here, though I did keep the same handle from the CES forum. @Jack-Waugh it would be fine to put my real name in this post.

Jack Waugh

@Psephomancy In my opinion, it's very important to account scrupulously for any money handled.

I have not done quite all the work by myself. Others researched and drafted and reviewed the legaleze we publish, designed the look of the home page, and came up with the overall concept.

SaraWolk

When the forum was originally set up Jack just put it all in his own name as a stopgap, but that was never the permanent plan.

At the last meeting we discussed funds and bookkeeping and managing of that kind of thing and decided to do that through Equal Vote so we don't need a whole separate person/process for treasury and bookkeeping. They also voted to coalition unanimously (I abstained.)

The other reason mentioned was the "What if I get hit by a bus" issue, so we have been in the process of moving the forum into the fold of Equal Vote assets to ensure that passing of keys can be ensured, and adjudicated if needed, should anything happen to whoever has it in their name currently.

As part of that I've put in a bunch of hours over the last month on the back end and we now have the url on our the Equal Vote account and are paying for it from Equal Vote. Donations for the Forum can also be made to Equal Vote with earmarking for the Forum if desired. We also obtained a grant from Azure that can pay for the hosting, so the plan is to move the hosting there.

Again, Voting Theory Forum is still fully autonomous and this is a service that Equal Vote can offer and is happy to provide since we already manage this stuff for a number of other sites in our network.