ko kāihe ahau ✝️CERN MS costs increase tenfold, reveals it’s been looking at alternatives for a year.
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/13/cern-microsoft-alternatives-project-open-source-software/
Dave Lane 
🇳🇿@donkey Just shows why it's foolish to invest in an infrastructure built on someone else's proprietary technology (for reasons I explain here: https://davelane.nz/mshostage) - I'm pleased they're making the move now, but they should've been smart enough to realise this could happen at any time. And now it's going to be very expensive and painful to change because they've allowed themselves to succumb to lock-in, not because the #FOSS alternative is painful.
@donkey Sadly for the taxpayers of the world, all of our gov'ts are in the same boat, but they've *always* been paying the 10x more amount... for the past 20ish years. Imagine if that $ had been invested in the local industry instead, and in local enhancement of #FOSS that everyone could've used instead...
Strypey@lightweight @donkey I was frothing at the mouth when I found out how much #CorporateWelfare the #NZ government has been giving FarceBook every year to "advertise" to its own citizens. It could have built its own social network system for that sort of money.
From the piece by @lightweight
> Your business is effectively a non-voting subsidiary of your supplier. At the very least, you have a potentially catastrophic dependence. The supplier could choose, at any time, to ... compete with you and take over your market
This has disturbing implications for an elected public government that has to pay FB - a anti-democratic private government - to commununicate with it's citizens.
@donkey
@strypey @lightweight agreed - there’s a lot of tension there between “where the people are”, “what we can afford” and the “what is best for democracy”.
@donkey @strypey Sadly, that conflict only exists for people without sufficient technical knowledge and strategic savvy to realise that it's not a "network effect" or technology problem. All could be sorted, as I've told them in the past, for very low cost using openly available software from the global digital #FOSS commons.
@lightweight @strypey yup. At least they seem to have listened regarding the paperless voting.., 😉
@donkey @strypey well, eventually even the gov't spy agency agreed that it was a totally unwarranted risk to take. But there are still people in Local Gov't especially who're committed to foisting online voting upon us because they don't "get" tech stuff (or, perhaps, how crucial it is that voters can trust our democratic institution & those administering it). I've talked to some of them.
@lightweight that's not the reason. Have you seen how much it costs to send a letter now? With the last users of snail mail moving to digital billing, and even the government moving to email and secure messaging within its websites, postal voting is rapidly becoming uneconomic. This is why digital voting for local body elections *will* happen. We can stick our fingers in the dyke, or we can put our energy into influencing *how* it happens.
@donkey
@donkey
@lightweight obviously I share these concerns ;) So I would focus on educating folks at #LGNZ, #ElectoralCommission etc about the importance of independently auditable voting software *and* hardware. I suspect they see #NZOSS as partisan, since its members and their companies stand to gain financially from a free market in free code voting software. So I would work with #InternetNZ, or another organization not vulnerable to that perceived conflict of interest, to do that education work.
@strypey to be fair, part of our education needs to be that we *do not* have a pecuniary interest in open source tools as none of us have any proprietary guarantee of getting any #FOSS-related work. We are simply trying to ensure that the voter doesn't get shafted by (probably low quality, if all the international precedents are anything to go by) proprietary system that cannot be usefully audited. To us, permissionless auditability is necessary (but not sufficient) for any #onlinevoting system.
@lightweight you're preaching to the choir mate ;) But you can't deny that a decision to exclude proprietary vendors from consideration improves the chances of getting contracts for those already working with free code software. I know that #NZOSS isn't intended to be a trade association, but in a small county like #NZ, with its membership overlapping heavily with those in the industry, it's highly likely to seem like one to those outside its circles.
@strypey heh - well, given that I don't do that kind of work, I have no pecuniary interest... and until now only proprietary would've even been considered. Having the whole solution be auditable by *any interested party* without requiring permission is key to it having a chance of standing up to scrutiny. A proprietary #onlinevoting system should be rejected on democratic principles.
@lightweight again, you're teaching Grandma to suck eggs here. All these arguments are as self-evident to me as they are to you. But if you want to have some influence over whether/how digital voting is introduced in local body elections, it's necessary to consider not only how you look from the POV of yourself and your allies (eg me), but how we might look to the people making these decisions. Our arguments, however articulate and technically correct, will be boosted or muted on that basis.
@strypey I think we've already got sufficient allies who recognised our credibility within gov't that we'll manage to prevail in this and block #onlinevoting. Ultimately, the people pushing it have an obvious problem: the solution they're dead set on getting does not address the problem they have, and the facts don't support them. When democracy is concerned, I'm not much of a diplomat. Those in favour of #onlinevoting are simply either not sufficiently well informed, or are not credible.
@strypey ultimately, it'll be all of us against Microsoft, so I think I'll have to swallow my bile and watch Josh's explanation all the way through and try to sift through the layers of obfuscation to see if there's a legitimate kernel in there...
@lightweight the problem they have is the rapidly increasing cost of postal ballots and the end of the snail mail delivery system in the forseeable future, due to the combination of falling volumes and rising costs (fossil fuel dependency etc). I'm still waiting for you, @vik or Chris to address this and presumably so are the people making decisions about the future of local body elections.
@strypey @vik the alternative to postal *and* #onlinevoting is to simplify the ballot for in-person voting. I think that's the best option. And perhaps have more votes.
Incident Creator ❎@lightweight
Postal ballots will still be needed for rural and less abled voters. Cost of post goes down in bulk. My local supermarket manages to poke a leaflet in my letterbox on a weekly basis, and I'm rural. Not convinced the actual cost of delivery is escalating.
@strypey
Postal ballots will still be needed for rural and less abled voters. Cost of post goes down in bulk. My local supermarket manages to poke a leaflet in my letterbox on a weekly basis, and I'm rural. Not convinced the actual cost of delivery is escalating.
@strypey
I agree with @vik that in-person voting either excludes people in far-flung areas or with mobility issues, or if you run enough polling stations to avoid this, is prohibitively expensive for local body elections. Having "more votes" (more frequent elections? Referenda?) would make it even more expensive. Unless you held local body elections the same year as general elections and used the same polling booths?
@lightweight
@lightweight
@strypey @vik and if gov't did what I told them to, implementing https://openstrandards.nz they'd have enough money in savings to run an election every month... :)
@lightweight funny, I didn't know local councils did fossil fuel subsidies or had military budgets ... ;)
@vik
@vik
@lightweight good question :) My understanding is that each council has to cover the cost of running its own elections out of rates. This would be a good thing to clarify with LGNZ.
@vik
@vik
@vik you're not comparing apples with apples here. Your local supermarket don't have to deliver to about 3 million voters spread across the country. They pay #AdPost, and other companies who specialize in targeted ad delivery runs to the areas surrounding retail outlets. We used them once to deliver a few hundred community newspaper, it was expensive and a lot of the papers never got through. From then on we had volunteers fold and deliver them, a day's work for 15 people.
@lightweight
@lightweight
@vik Have you asked #LGNZ what delivering voting papers costs their member councils every three years? You can't trust circular delivery companies, for the same reason you can't trust proprietary software vendors. They need to be delivered by posties, probably as registered mail. Have you seen what sending a letter costs these days, compared to 5 years ago? 10? Extrapolate that curve. Councils are saying this is why they're turning to digital voting. Why don't you believe them?
@lightweight
@lightweight
@vik @lightweight have you ever been involved in delivering campaign leaflets for political candidates? I have. A number of times, beginning in 1984. Getting a leaflet to every voter is a mammoth task, requiring a huge amount of coordination to make sure every household is covered, but only once per run, to keep printing costs down. Without professional posties who know their runs, paying people to do this would much more than doing it through a regular postal service. About as much as couriers.
@strypey @vik I totally get the pressures local councils are under, and I get why they're enthralled by the tantalising mirage (@kayakr's turn of phrase) of #onlinevoting. But ultimately, the issue is that voting online undermines the entire democratic process. LGNZ don't have an easy way out. Voting online is not the solution - it has all the flaws of postal voting, plus many more besides.
@strypey @lightweight I don't believe them because I can get things paid for and delivered to my house from China for less than the cost of a standard envelope in NZ.
@lightweight @vik if you can negotiate a bulk delivery discount for local elections, I'm sure LGNZ would love to hear from you. Otherwise you're essentially extrapolating from mass delivery of Christmas presents to a proposal that Santa deliver voting papers.