[VVSG-post-election] Announcement of upcoming interoperability
Wack, John (Fed)
I'm sending this message about upcoming interoperability working group telecons to all of the public working groups, which I normally don't do but in this case we have some work going on that you might want to know about and thus attend.
Coming this Friday, 14 October, there is a telecon hosted by Kenneth Bennett of LA County; Kenneth will present an overview of the election business process modeling work, going over the goals of the project and the methodology he has chosen. He will then go through the models themselves and show how they are arranged and work together. This is getting to be a significant body of work, with many models developed thus far. It has become useful in the interoperability working group in that the business process models perform the basis for use cases for the common data formats, in that the models show election processes that are, in general, common across all states. Kenneth and attendees of the telecons have done an excellent job and I believe you will be impressed with the amount of work. I urge you to attend this telecon and learn more.
Coming Friday, 28 October, there is a telecon hosted by Lauren Massa-Lochridge, who will present the voting method/models work, which aims, in a nutshell, to formally define voting variations (methods), with the ultimate goal that this work be available for inclusion in the next VVSG and/or other standards. This work has become increasingly valuable to the interoperability working group as it works in areas that involve items such as cast vote records and tabulation. Recently, there have been a number of very good online discussions about issues regarding ranked choice voting (RCV) and other lesser-used voting methods that manufacturers still need to include in their offerings in a consistent, well-defined way. I urge you to attend this telecon as well; Lauren's work can be highly mathematical but she plans to present it such that it is accessible to all audiences.
Coming Friday, 11 November, I will host the interoperability working group telecon and focus on the glossary that we have developed for use with the public working groups, the next VVSG, and for use in general in the elections world. This glossary was built from glossaries in the VVSG versions as well as other elections glossaries available. It contains a large number of terms and aims to define a primary term and associated definition, and then include other terms as used in other states such that different terms point to the same definition. I need help and advice with this glossary, thus my aim is to make you aware of it, go over it structure, and then discuss whether its shape and form needs to change to better accommodate its goals.
Please see the interoperability public working group page (http://collaborate.nist.gov/voting/bin/view/Voting/Interoperability) for more details about these telecons and how to add them to your calendar. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Cheers, John