The OSDV Foundation

From OSDVwiki

The OSDV Foundation is a tax-exempt California Public Benefit Corporation and a pending IRS 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. The purpose of the Foundation is to provide support for the work of the OSDV Project.

The OSDV Foundation’s support for the OSDV community is based on an approach where the community’s work is supported by the OSDV Foundation’s funds and staff, including a team of experienced technology and policy folks who serve as architects and project leads for a variety of activities. All activities are fundamentally open, with participation across a meritocratic group of technology and policy experts in the computer technology sector including members of academic, commercial, and public administration organizations. The work of this community includes development of the specifications, draft standards, and reference implementations of high assurance, high veracity digital voting technology. The OSDV community is tackling the problems of voting technology by creating solutions in the public trust through a transparent process that builds on the principles of open source (some of which dates back to the seminal work of Eric Raymond).

The OSDV Foundation is modeled after similar non profit ventures, such as the Mozilla Foundation. For more information on the OSDV Foundation’s operations, see our Mission, our Charter, and our Bylaws.

[edit] Goals and Objectives

The Foundation has the following five goals:

• Provide clear, neutral, and sustainable public ownership of design specifications, request for comments documentation, draft standards, software code, hardware architecture, patents, and other intellectual properties and domains.
• Establish an accountable and transparent decision-making structure for the essential activities of the Foundation.
• Promote activities designed to help grow the OSDV “movement” – “Lectio Reformo” – our call for election reform in general, and specifically to re-invent how technology empowers and protects the cornerstone of democracy: every U.S. citizen’s vote.
• Advance the free adoption of the OSDV technology standards, and the SHARP technology framework.
• Solicit additional funding and public participation in order to continue the work of the Foundation.

More: see wiki info on OSDV People, the OSDV web site, especially the Overview, which describes the overall problems addressed by OSDV, the types of work toward solutions, the approach to that work, and who will benefit. Also, the FAQ describes the essential differences between the OSDV Foundation and other public interest groups focused on voting. And if you haven’t seen a copy of the first draft of our manifesto, “Lectio Reformo” then please check it out and let us know what you think.