Bitcoin Magazine, which has featured Follow My Vote before, is actually a contributor on Nasdaq.com and is responsible for the article entitled “Four Ways the Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place”

Here is what was written about us on Nasdaq.com:

“The blockchain is also being leveraged by startups that aim to improve the democratic process of regional and national elections. Election fraud is a common occurrence in developing countries, but as we have witnessed in the latest U.S. presidential elections, even the most developed countries can struggle to deliver a fair and democratic election process.

Voter registration and vote counting are two areas in which the distributed ledger technology can provide solutions. The blockchain can be used to digitally record all eligible voters and can be used to publicly record every single vote during elections. A startup that is tackling this area is Virginia-based Follow My Vote. Follow My Vote has developed an open-source digital voting platform for governments built on top of the distributed ledger technology with the aim to make elections more transparent and democratic.”

The article goes on to mention the following companies who are also making the world a better place with blockchain technology:

AID:Tech is currently working on digital identities for refugees.

Bitland & ChromaWay are separate companies both working on recording land ownership.

And BitGive tracks financial donations with blockchain.

The status of Follow My Vote

The article focuses on the application of our blockchain voting software for governments, and while it is true that our software could completely revolutionize government elections, we are not actively working with any governments to provide voting services at this time. Contact us if you represent a government, and wish to learn more about blockchain voting.

The truth is, our blockchain voting software has applications in numerous industries. To learn more, explore our use cases under the “Our Technology” tab.

Since our completion of the stake weighted voting software for BitShares, we are open to new contracts and business relationships.  We build open source end-to-end verifiable blockchain voting software.

Source: Nasdaq.com

Read this post on Steemit: steemit.com/@followmyvote

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Nasdaq.com Features Follow My Vote & How Blockchain Will Make the World a Better Place appeared first on Follow My Vote.

On February 22, Brian was the featured speaker of a fireside chat for hack.summit(). hack.summit() is a virtual event for developers that features programming language creators,
open-source contributors, and thought leaders. Brian is prominently featured on the hack.summit website.

In his fireside chat, Brian discussed many topics but most notable were computer programming as a kid, globbing and other Bash related anecdotes, the open source movement, and Follow My Vote. The discussion about open source voting and Follow My Vote begins at 21:45.

To learn more about the open source movement visit our page on open source code. Here we explain the importance of open source projects and cover licenses and organizations like the Open Source Initiative.

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post Brian Fox Speaks At hack.summit() On Open Source Voting appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The post Google Tries Their Own Voting System: A Liquid Democracy Experiment appeared first on Follow My Vote.

The post Play the 2016 Candidate Match Game from USA Today appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Under the new system, slated for public use in 2020, voters will indicate their choices on a touchscreen-operated tablet, after which a machine at the voting booth will print and process their paper ballots to be tallied. This is a leap from the ink-based system, which has remained unchanged since its adoption in 2003.

Currently the open source voting system is being developed and they are working on the user experience. The project is being tested on citizens for refinement of the interface. All demographics are getting a chance to test the system including senior citizens, people with disabilities, veterans, and speakers of foreign languages.

The county is also looking at ways to increase their voter turnout. One way they hope to do this is through a “poll pass”, which would allow voters to pre-check their vote on their phone and have a QR code scanned when they walk into the polling place. They hope that this will streamline the voting process and increase civic engagement.

LA County has partnered with Travis County in Texas to help build the open source voting system and carry out the plan.

We commend LA County for moving toward a more open source voting model! However this is a small step in the right direction. We would like to point out that people still have to go to the polls, wait in line, and their system will still waste paper.   Specialized and expensive machines will still have to be purchased for tallying ballots and recording the results. The fact is, election officials will still be the only people to tally the votes, meaning everyone must continue to trust them (The possibility of corruption still exists). We believe that one of the most important parts of an election is the vote recording process. It is not who votes that matters, but who counts the votes. And with Follow My Vote we put the vote counting in the hands of the people.

Check out all the benefits of our online open source voting platform here and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Source: Los Angeles County voting to shift from inkblots to open source

About the author: Will Long is the Marketing Manager of Follow My Vote.

The post LA County Makes Moves Towards Open Source Voting! appeared first on Follow My Vote.

This article takes a look at some great ideas that you can implement into your petition strategy to make sure that the mass of people you have assembled behind your cause is well led and instructed. Being a good leader will help to focus your group and make sure that benchmarks are met.

What are some tools that you can think of that would make the charge of a petition stronger still?

Online petitions are everywhere. Increasingly news stories contain the line “an online petition has attracted thousands of signatures”, while Twitter and Facebook feeds are awash with people looking for support. The Government likes them so much they set up their own site. But are they any good and do they work?

My answer (unsurprisingly from someone who runs the UK branch of the world’s largest petition site) is ‘yes’ – but in themselves, petitions are only the start of a dynamic and exciting campaign journey. Petitions can win with ten signatures or with 10 million signatures. Despite the best efforts of the UK government to make 100,000 signatures the arbitrary petition signer threshold for access to our own elected leaders, there are no hard and fast rules. It’s not the size of the petition, it’s what the signers do that counts.

Petitions are simply a big group of people. As such they are the basis of your movement – the army you assemble to march toward your target. An un-commanded army is just a group of people ambling about. When you start the petition you are the general of this army and the soldiers need to be well commanded and well armed. In this incredibly stretched metaphor, you arm them with tactics to convey the message.

On Change.org we have hundreds of examples of ordinary individuals who’ve got people to do extraordinary things. One of the best is Lucy Holmes who has been using Change.org (as well as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, TV and newspapers) to ask the editor of the Sun newspaper to drop page three.

She’s got an 85,000 strong petition which, in and of itself, won’t win it alone. It’s the activity around it – the two way conversation she has with her supporters that makes the campaign so powerful. It’s the creative tactics like Leanne (a ‘Lego page 3 model’) that engages existing supporters, brings in new ones and generates publicity: a virtuous circle that’s made this one of the biggest people powered movements of recent times.

Then there’s Jayne Linney – ATOS wouldn’t record her disability assessment after continually getting her details wrong, despite ministerial statements that they would do. She started a Change.org petition and got a relatively modest 1,500 signatures but by combining this with traditional tactics like writing to MPs and calling local journalists she won her campaign too.

There was a great line in a local newspaper about a petition on our site, “the petition gathered over 12 signatures in two days” it’s easy to laugh – but it proves that there’s no magic number. And nor should there be. Campaigning is about taking people on a journey, engaging them in conversation and making them think about what they’re doing.

Read More Here: theguardian.com.

The post Learn How to Start Your Own Online Petition appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Online voting requires independent accountability. Blockchain is the best available protocol to guarantee that accountability: a decentralized ledger that can certify any kind of event that happens online. Any user, without the need of requesting permission to an organization, can validate and count every interaction or vote that was made by an online application. Who votes remains anonymous but how many votes is verifiable. By combining this protocol with the open source application DemocracyOS (backed by Y Combinator) we could offer an online solution for voting that could guarantee transparency and openness. This is the key to online trust and a leap civic tech needs.

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

Provide support to Open Source voting software DemocracyOS to register online votes in the Blockchain making them unchangeable and verifiable by third parties.

Briefly describe the need that you’re trying to address.

Online voting is still perceived as polling and registering votes in the blockchain can build trust in this process by making the counted votes verifiable by anyone (even if they don’t use or access DemocracyOS). Any implementation of electronic voting can benefit from this technology being available for free with its entire source code available, hopefully becoming a standard for such action. Online civic participation benefits from transparency (open source) and trust (blockchain) by having a robust combination of these technologies.

What progress have you made so far?

DemocracyOS is one of the most active open source efforts to deliver a debate and voting platform. The application has been under development for 3 years with a strong community that contributes daily to its source code (github.com/democracyos) and a hub platform for quick and easy setups. Blockchain use has grown exponentially in the quantity of transactions since 2010 (mostly for commercial applications that support Bitcoin) but as the technology matures new applications are developed. DemocracyOS development and designs team has been exploring it as a way to certify events in time (contracts, transactions and votes) as a side project. We now see it as a core feature of our software and a useful development for other civic tech apps that can benefit from it.

Read More Here: http://pi.vu/66aT.

The post Blockchain Technology offers Support to DemocracyOS appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Learn how you can become a part of the push to digitize our nations voting platform and bring about the Digital Democracy through education and advocacy!

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) serves as an international nexus of trust, protecting and promoting open source software as well as the communities that develop and depend on it. Primarily known for our work in certifying open source software licenses, the OSI’s work today has grown—just as open source has—to include a variety of member-driven working groups and incubator projects that help practitioners and communities create and share resources, furthering the open source movement. For 17 years, the OSI has brought together open source developers, organizers, contributors, advocates, and businesses toward the common goal of creation through collaboration. Our membership campaign is dedicated to furthering this vision.

Our goal is to sign up 2,398 new individual members in celebration of the organization’s founding on 2/3/98. The “2,398 for 2/3/98” membership drive will also run in parallel with the OSI’s annual board elections, which started with nominations opening February 2 and runs through April 1, when the new board directors take their seats. The membership campaign will become an annual event.

Why join?

Membership provides several benefits to individuals, the OSI, and the open source software community. In addition to standard member benefits such as free and discounted books, magazines, conference registrations, and other learning and training materials, as a member-driven organization OSI individual members can vote for OSI board directors and even run for a seat.

In addition to governance, individual members are invited to join or create OSI-sponsored working groups and incubator projects in various areas of open source advocacy and adoption. These working groups and projects serve as resources for the entire open source community.

Read More Here: https://opensource.com/life/15/2/defending-open-source-join-osi-today

The post What is the Open Source Initiative (OSI)? appeared first on Follow My Vote.

Tell us about yourself and California Association of Voting Officials (CAVO).

I am a California-based civil rights activist with a focus on election system security. In 2000, I became interested in reformist efforts, and in 2005 began advocating for open source (GPL) systems. Initially there was a group called Open Voting Consortium doing good work; then the California Association of Voting Officials was created.

CAVO’s mission is to oversee the deployment of publicly-owned/state-certified OS voting systems. Publicly-owned open source (General Public License) voting systems will be less expensive and more secure. Off-the-shelf commodity hardware can be utilized as well.

Tell us about the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), its origins, and what it now calls for.

HAVA was created in response to the 2000 debacle. Lobbyists Bob Ney and Jack Abramoff pushed for it, and the rest is history. Basically, America was sold a 4.5 billion dollar batch of bogus voting systems that government reports have condemned as flawed. The vendors seized the lock-in opportunity to push poorly-made and high-priced systems, and it continues to this day.

The good part of the Act was its attempt to accommodate the disability community, but that attempt failed. The disability community is still hopeful for a future technological solution.

Read More Here: https://opensource.com/government/15/3/open-source-transparent-voting/

The post Who is Leading for Transparency in Democratic Elections appeared first on Follow My Vote.

“Here’s this hopelessly geeky new technology. It’s too hard to understand and use. How could it ever break the mass market? Yet developers are excited, venture capital is pouring in, and industry players are taking note. Something big might be happening.”

That is exactly how the Web looked back in 1994 — right before it exploded. Two decades later, it’s beginning to feel like we might be at a similar liminal moment. Our new contender for the Next Big Thing is the blockchain — the baffling yet alluring innovation that underlies the Bitcoin digital currency.

Wait a minute and I’ll explain exactly how the blockchain works. (Or at least try.) For now, think of it as a way of transferring a digital message from one party to another, where both parties can count on the integrity of the message, even when they don’t trust, or even know, each other. Right now, these messages are mostly virtual cash. But they could be any kind of information.

On an Internet where your inbox is besieged with spam, your credit card number’s about to be poached, and you can’t possibly remember all your passwords, this could be extremely useful. But it could be even more.

There is a contingent on today’s Internet—a minority, perhaps, but influential—who believe that the industry took a wrong turn over the past decade. That an Internet dominated by a few big companies is an unhealthy one. That the centralized-computing paradigm—of privately owned data silos housed in giant server farms that harvest our personal data in order to sell ads—is one that needs to change.

The entrepreneurs, coders and crypto experts leading the blockchain charge — I shall call them blockchainiacs, because they need a name — see this new technology as an antidote, and they are hopped up on dizzying visions of a disrupted future. (One sure sign that this technology has achieved geek-cred critical mass: The tech publisher O’Reilly just announced a new conference on the topic.)

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE

The post Could Blockchain Technology Be Used To Create An Alternate Internet? appeared first on Follow My Vote.