Secret Voting aka. [insert funny name here]

[p0wl]

Hey 👋

the possibility of secret voting at an unconf has been discussed multiple times now and I would love to make "small" project out of it.

Of course there is no way to solve this other than building an IOT, SERVERLESS, DESIGN SYSTEM BASED, E2E TESTED, ... (BLOCKCHAIN????!!!??!!) solution. So grab your favorite hype and let's do this!

As a start I'll just write down what I remember from discussions.

Acceptance Criteria

• While voting, it should not be visible how many votes a proposal already got (secret voting)
• Votes should be counted automatically
• The number of proposals is unknown, but should be <50 (?)
• After voting, the ranking of the proposals needs to be available online (including amount of votes per proposal)
• Proposal displayed close to voting machine (in order to encourage discussion about proposal)

Nice to have

• A vote should be real object (like a marble, poker chip or similar) that can be given to participants
• Paperless / without any paper?
• Works without wifi / bad wifi
• Works with batteries

Same in google doc, please question, improve, add stuff: Secret Voting Acceptance Criteria

I think a slightly slimmed down version of this should be enough. Anyone interested @robin-drexler @klyrr @filtercake @halfbyte @tobias-jimdo @tillkahlbrock (everyone welcome)

(had no other idea where else to start this topic)

[halfbyte]

I love the idea. I think a physical thing would be preferable as we don't want to exclude people from voting who don't have a internet device with them.

So, we had a discussion about the actual physical object to use to do the voting. Marbles are cool, but also, as Irina remarked, tend to roll away and, especially in large quantities, probably could be hazardous.

Today, I had an idea: What about Dice? They are relatively cheap even in large quantities (if we start thinking about this now, we should be able to get a deal from dubious far east sources), they don't roll away and they are available in very contrasting colors. If we stick to normal n6's (I'm not an RPG person, is this the correct term?) we should also be able to build easy mechanisms for easy stacking and counting, so that counting is quick. (We could also attempt light barrier counting and have it available electronically of course). Also normal n6s are ubiquitous and so loss of tokens during the conf should be relatively less severe than using shiny marbles, or d20's or so.

The only real alternative I see is poker chips, and they also would work pretty well, I'd imagine. They are also made for easy stacking and they should be relatively cheap to buy in REALLY huge quantities.

Speaking of quantities, quick napkin calc:

• 400 visitors (optimistic JSUnConf estimation)
• 4 chips per day
• 2 days

Makes 3200 items. That's a lot.

An initial search on Alibaba suggests that dice may actually be cheaper which surprised me.

[p0wl]

started a repository and some notes here: https://github.com/p0wl/unconf-voting/projects/1. Would love contributions =)