Morning,
Last week was an experiment to see how my audience would react to receiving my newsletter daily. In the first three days, I had an open rate of 30%. By Thursday this dropped to 20%. I took that as a clear sign that every day is too much. It could also be that the drop in both open rate and subscribers (minus 30 subs and now down to 900 subscribers) is due to this list being multiple that I compiled from my Mailchimp list.
Either way, I’ve decided to try writing throughout the week on twitter and on medium and then publishing the newsletter at the end of the week on Friday or Sunday. I feel this will allow me to take more time to create focused in-depth content on more specific topics.
For example, this week I’m compiling a list of every Open Source elections systems project that I can find and analyzing each one. You may or may not know that there is a growing movement of people who are advocating for and building Open Source elections systems across the United States.
We’re doing this because currently there are only 3 main elections systems vendors whose companies are privately owned by persons and entities that are not American. Furthermore, the systems sold by these vendors are closed source. This means that the code running on those machines is a black box that the general public can not audit to verify the authenticity of the software, that it wasn’t hacked, and most importantly that their vote was counted properly.
Open Source systems solve these problems because they are transparent and verifiable. You can see all the code and who has written every single line. Finally, our elections systems are a PUBLIC GOOD. They should be 100% free for anyone to use and customize for those who have the skill and the will to do so.
This is not a political issue. Everyone should agree that we want our elections to be secure and trusted. Unfortunately, there are those in our political sphere who would prevent the creation and utilization of Open Source systems.
There is hope! There are many politicians, developers, advocates, and entrepreneurs who are working towards securing our elections systems with Open Source tools. You’ll see when I report back with the list and analysis.
Needless to say, this is going to be my focus for this week. I’ll be blogging, vlogging, and podcasting about this. If you want to follow my progress and research in realtime, follow me on twitter. Otherwise, I’ll send out the newsletter on Friday or Sunday.
As always, stay safe and reach out with any questions, ideas and/or suggestions.
Best,
Alex
P.S. I got most of my podcasting equipment and am now running some tests and practicing!
We'd be very interested in speaking with you about this topic as we've been immersed in it for over 13 years. We're a free-standing nonprofit, nonpartisan election technology R&D org started by ex-Netscapees, and friends from Apple, Mozilla, Facebook, and Sun Microsystems. We're 60 people strong with a considerable investment in government relations and a significant technology undertaking. Please see: https://bit.ly/OSET2018r for our Annual Review to learn a bit more, and our Impact Statement: https://bit.ly/OSETimpact and feel free to connect with co-founder Gregory Miller (gam@osetfoundation.org). Thanks for your essay here. This realm is challenging, exciting, nuanced, and addresses a global problem.