It’s Selectric!

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Several months ago, I announced that I’d received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application.

I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we’ve built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:

http://selectricity.org

There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There’s also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We’ll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months.

No doubt, I’ll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place.

You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we’ll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.

9 Replies to “It’s Selectric!”

  1. I’m old enough  to remember when IBM Selectric typewriters were famous.

    Hope you don’t run into copyright issues.

  2. It’s party time!

    This is a most excellent development.  I look forward to the publication of an API so that this wondrous voting technology can be woven into the blogbasket of freedom for a new tomorrow.

    Is it the future yet?

  3. C’mon Paul. You’ve been a journalist long enough to know that the subjects have little say in what the press release says and that this is very frequently reflected in the content of what is released.

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