Roan Kattouw

Elections in the US rely heavily on software. Whether we cast our votes using a computer, or on paper ballots that are then scanned, software interprets our votes, counts them, tabulates the results, and calls the winner. Almost all of this software is proprietary, and owned by a handful of large companies.

A few jurisdictions have plans to move to free software, are funding its development, or are already using it. I'll give an overview of free software projects for election-related software around the US, with a focus on San Francisco's project, where I'm on the Technical Advisory Committee.

Wikipedia is supposed to be "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". However, from our research we know that that's not really true. The wikitext markup used on most Wikipedia articles has gotten so complex that most people can't figure out how to make changes. To address this problem, the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikia are developing VisualEditor, a new, WYSIWYG-like editor for wiki pages. VisualEditor is already available on Wikipedia, but in this presentation I will show you how you can install VisualEditor on your own wiki and customize it to your needs.

While VisualEditor is primarily developed with editing MediaWiki pages in mind, we deliberately designed it from the ground up to be a generic HTML editor, completely independent from MediaWiki. Our long-term goal is to make VisualEditor the FLOSS HTML editor for the web; to make it so much better than other editors out there that other projects will want to use it too. We're very excited about the prospect of integrating VisualEditor with other applications than MediaWiki, because so many HTML / rich text editors on the web today just aren't things people want to use.