Functional requirements for any potential replacement for Pirate Party Iceland

[helgihg]

These are the functional requirements that Wasa2il fulfills and must be fulfilled by any potential replacement. This list was produced as a part of an ongoing conversation about potentially replacing Wasa2il with a different system for Pirate Party Iceland. No such decision has been made and no time frame exists for making it.

• SAML 2.0 verification of users, independent of user database (Icekey-compatibility, essentially). Login must not be based on such verification because users must be verifiable by other means as well, for example by the showing of a physical ID card. They must also be anonymizable.

• Voting of candidates with ordered results by Schulze.

• Voting of candidates with unordered results by STV.

• Voting on issues, by simple majority or supermajority, which produce agreements.

• Trackable changes of agreements over time.

• Multiple, organizable polities such as affiliated organizations and local parties.

• API for external, programmatic user management, including users' polity affiliation.

• Exportable user data (as per GDPR).

• Customizable Terms and Conditions.

[viktorsmari]

Excellent.

I have done, and will continue to do more research for alternatives.

My personal criteria is that the new software should be:

1. Open source, of course.
2. Active on Github with many contributers, and the latest commit preferably not older than one year.
3. Preferably also backed by a government / municipality / institution.

Examples:

• https://github.com/decidim/decidim
• https://github.com/consul/consul

I have used Decidim before, being a citizen of Barcelona, and I am currently looking further into that. Maybe we would need to develop a voting module for Schulze to add to the Decidim community, if one does not already exist.

All suggestions are welcome!

[helgihg]

Excellent observations, I wholeheartedly agree.

[helgihg]

Schulze may be negotiable in the near future, so maybe it's not a make-or-break feature. We're using it to generate ordered lists of candidates, but the method is, and always has been, rather controversial, not least because it's quite complicated and therefore rather untransparent. If another method is available for generating ordered lists of candidates, it's quite possible to open up the question of whether we should rather change the voting method. None of them are perfect, but Schulze has received legitimate criticism in the past.

[PeterTheOne]

If you check out some tools, you may want to look at http://aula-blog.website/homepage/ ( https://gitlab.com/delibrium/aula-app ) and https://github.com/PartiPirate/congressus/ , not sure how good they match with your requirements.

[boamaod]

Is there particular reason for discussing potential replacements for Wasa2il for PP-IS? I am asking because in PP-EE we discussed starting to use some flavour of e-decision platform and preferably something that is used by other PPs. Since Wasa2il seems quite simple in principle and developers hopefully approachable we would like give it a try if you also encourage doing it. If so, then another question is if you have any means to help with hosting the instance in your deployment system (at least for the start to test it out and prepare for use on our own server).

[helgihg]

I'm sure others could give different opinions, but in my personal case, it's because having developed and maintained it for years and years, I don't feel that we have the manpower to develop and maintain it in the manner that I think it should be. There are simply not enough people with the time to make it as awesome as it should be.

[viktorsmari]

Completely agree with @helgihg - you could say that Wasa2il is now only a 'hobby' project, many projects with proper funding have surpassed us by years.

@boamaod did you check the suggestions above, for example Decidim and Consul?

Those are being actively developed and they are backed by a local government, so there is always someone working on improving, maintaining and adding new features.

I would really like to hear from a fellow PP organization that has used something more modern.

[boamaod]

I think Decidim and Consul are a lot like https://github.com/CitizensFoundation/your-priorities-app, isn't it? Why don't you migrate to that for example? For my part, I think these are very generic tools, but somehow for Pirate Party context I prefer minimalism and accountability and I want system to be easily modified for my purposes.