DA At Large Directors elections 2013

Updated some tech info

Sandbox with the feature to support this: https://drupal.org/sandbox/pcambra/2055911

Added shut off date for nomination form

Updated issue summary: Added Dates and Voting eligibility + Note about openSTV software.

Clean up and formatting.

I have updated the issue with dates...

Timeline

This is the timeline that was posted in the board packet in April 2013

• Nominations Sept 1 - 6
• Meet the candidates Sept 8 - 13
• Voting Sept 15 - 19
• Counting/Announce Sept 20

Voting Eligibility

"Voting will be open to all drupal.org account holders who have logged in during the past year and whose accounts were registered before nominations opened."
This is documented here: https://groups.drupal.org/node/200138#comment-666928

Further background: https://groups.drupal.org/node/201753

Note: I will be in transit from Sept 12-20 and unable to assist.

We need more tech information on steps after the initial launch, such as "shut off ability to submit nominations" and "bulk-publish all nomination". What are the specific changes on the site to make these transitions happen?

removed a .

I merged pcambra's code into this module: http://drupalcode.org/project/association_drupalorg.git/commit/10084a5. A couple followups were needed:

• The new block made the site into a fatal error when there is no nomination: http://drupalcode.org/project/association_drupalorg.git/commit/ea8f011
• I re-exported the feature to take care of trivial overrides: http://drupalcode.org/project/association_drupalorg.git/commit/13bbd48

Changes to this feature should now be posted as patches or tarball exports. All changes should be put into the feature. We do not enable Views UI in production to prevent having Views that are overridden or otherwise not backed by code.

I deployed this to production and created the election and position. I also did a run of filling association_at_large_elections_electorate. This has been snapshotted and I build a fresh copy of elections-association.redesign.devdrupal.org. Please check that things look sane there and the election/position are good.

I added sections for "Opening nominations" and "Closing nominations" in the instructions above with specific instructions. These need to be filled out with anything I missed, and other phases need their own sections.

nomination process

aa

Updating per conversation with drumm and pcambra on 8/29/13

I just updated with a BUNCH of notes from today's conversation.

Nominations are now open.

If you have already submitted a nomination, https://association.drupal.org/2014nomination is a big access denied message, it should say you've already nominated yourself.

Hurrah! Kudos to getting this up and running!! :)

One post implementation issue I see is if you are not logged in and you click the "nominate yourself" button on https://association.drupal.org/node/18403 you get an access denied response as well.

We need to be friendlier here.

Should it direct to the user login page? Should we add "Login to nominate yourself" to the green button?

All of these access denied instead of a friendlier error issues would best be handled in election module itself. We should concentrate on making sure voting is friendly because we do want many people to vote.

Updated per 8/29/13 meeting with drumm and pcambra

Here we have two things that were discussed last week:

#2081923: Add confirmation texts in the voting page
#2081925: View for nominations

Thanks for those updates Pedro - so to confirm - we can test voting on the test site now, right? If so, I'll get staff and board on that this Friday. Tatiana - how are the styling changes for the candidates page?

so to confirm - we can test voting on the test site now, right?

The patches need to be applied and committed to the project and then deployed in the test site before testing. I'd need @drumm for reviewing the patches and @tvn for deploying them I guess :)

Added Tatiana to publish the nominations on 9/8

https://association.drupal.org/election/3/candidates is now open for information & debate.

There are absolutely no deployment instructions in the issue summary for this, so I'm sure I missed something that was supposed to be done, but not written down. Here's what I did do:

• Deployed #2081925: View for nominations along with updating to -dev for the election module.
• Created the block showing on the right of the page, removing some draft-looking text from last year.
• Configured the candidate block to show on candidate pages.

All CSS changes, starting from #2083657: Style candidate pages for elections went into bluecheese, so I could use the grid setup there.

Someone should add a URL alias to election/3/candidates at https://association.drupal.org/admin/config/search/path so it is a nicer URL.

Someone should add a URL alias to election/3/candidates at https://association.drupal.org/admin/config/search/path so it is a nicer URL.

I think that the url agreed was https://association.drupal.org/nominations

About the debate deployment instructions, I think is a matter of communication, the reply module is in place so people can comment on the candidates, we might need to add some sort of comment count in the candidate view (I did not think about this :|).

What I think needs to happen is that the candidates need to be published, Donna/Holly could you confirm when this needs to happen?

Also there should be a voting round in the test site to check if everything is in place.

I think the candidates are all published now - I tested it on multiple browsers, signed in and not - and everything looked good.

We are going to send out the voting instructions when Drumm gets the test table populated. I just sent him all the usernames to include.

Pedro - I think we need two quick fixes that get beyond the normal configuration (which I attempted to do)

1. Anyone can view the main candidate page at: https://association.drupal.org/election/3/candidates. However, only people who are logged into D.O can see the individual candidate pages (e.g. https://association.drupal.org/election-candidate/33). We would like candidates to be visible without logging in OR at the very least put a nicer message up than "Access Denied"

2. The candidate pages have comments enabled, but it is not displaying the name of the commenter. Can we update that page to do so?

If you could test this out on the dev server and create whatever we need for the live site (patch?) we would be grateful! Thanks!

Yes, I did publish the candidates.

I don't think we need a comment count in the candidate view. The view could use better truncation of About Me.

Regarding @holly.ross.drupal comments:

1. Permissions fixed in the website directly, here's a patch to catch up with that config: #2085107: Anonymous users should be able to view candidate pages for elections.

2. Big ouch on that, reply module needs the patch from: #1608238: Display submitted info on Replies and then our feature needs this fix: #2085109: Author of a comment on election candidate should be displayed in the reply

About @drumm comment, that's the default trim provided by views, Smart Trim could be an option: https://drupal.org/project/smart_trim

Committed both patches, thanks for the quick work on this!

Let's not bother with smart trim.

Just tested voting on the dev server. None of the changes outlined in the issue were addressed:

Voting process
Start date: 15 September 2013
End date: 19 September 2013
a. set up instant run-off voting for the elections themselves using the Elections module

• Add explanatory text on the voting page. If we can't do it within the module, please add a block that reads: How to Vote: To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an "instant runoff" method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, see videos linked in this discussion .
• Can we make voting drag and drop? i.e. can we drag the rankings to the candidate names? This was LOUDLY requested last year ⇐ https://drupal.org/node/674112 Patch committed to d.o/p/decisions, but we’re using d.o/p/election now.
• Make the "Confirm Your Vote" page VERY clear so that people do not abandon their votes: You have NOT completed your vote. Please review the information below. If it looks correct, press the “button name” button to submit your votes. Your votes will not be counted if you do not take this step.
• Thank you for voting block at end of process. Donna to make a web badge for that
• On the candidates page, a VOTE button will display when voting is turned on. If we can, style this so that it is more visible and not yellow. Make it look Drupal-y

who: Pedro
when: 9/5/13
status: ?

Can we get the dev site updated with changes before we share with other?

Explanatory text
Explanatory how to vote text is now in place.

Badges
I'd already done a badge to say "i-voted" :)

Do I also need to make a "Thanks for voting" badge? Or are we just talking about having the one I made there for people to download?

EG.... some thing like

"Thanks for voting in the At Large Director elections for the board of the Drupal Association.
Grab this badge for your blog or social media profile to let people know you put your hand up to be counted!"

Drag and Drop

I don't think we can do drag and drop... the elections interface is a little better than the decisions interface. I spoke to the module developer and he explained the reason he didn't implement drag and drop is that currently you don't have to choose all preferences
Note: we need to make that clear in the instructions.
EDIT: reopened issue #2081923: Add confirmation texts in the voting page

But a drag/drop rank would need to rank all candidates.

Finally d/d is not as accessible as a simple pull down select, which can be operated with a keyboard.

I think this is in the "would have been nice" and room for improvement next time category.

I did point out at the time that fixing it in decisions wasn't really going to solve the problem for us, and despite being admonished for it - no-one did actually step up and port Decisions to D7 in the past 12 months. So... meh!

This still leaves "confirm your vote" unresolved...

Thanks Donna! Looks like we're down to the "thank you for voting block" if we can get that implemented. That said, I think we can test voting now.

Thanks Donna! Looks like we're down to the "thank you for voting block" if we can get that implemented. That said, I think we can test voting now.

I've addressed @tvn comment on the live site. Here is a patch for fixing it in the feature

2. It seems that input format for comments is plain text, it would greatly improve readability if we change that to allow line breaks etc.

#2085921: Fix input format for reply comments on candidates for elections

Regarding this:

1. IRC handle in the sidebar block needs a label, otherwise it's not clear what is that

Views is exposing the label, I guess is not being printed in a tpl?

Also updated texts for pre vote in #2081923: Add confirmation texts in the voting page

Committed #2085921: Fix input format for reply comments on candidates for elections and #2081923: Add confirmation texts in the voting page

Here's a thank you badge thingie...

oops - switch to review for the Thank you badge

Feedback from Angie on Voting:
- I'm not sure how easy this would be, especially to put together at the last minute, but it would be SO much better if the voting table here looked like https://association.drupal.org/election/3/candidates instead of http://vote-association.redesign.devdrupal.org/election-post/1/vote.

At the very least, we should very prominently link that page here. Else, most people are very lazy and only going to vote for the names they recognize. A quick "teaser" blurb + picture would give them a reason to click on the names to read more.

- We should also prominently link to an explanation on IRV. That was hugely confusing to people last election(s). There is a link there, but it's the words "this discussion" rather than "explanation of how instant runoff voting works" that are linked, so that's a bit less obvious. Also, ideally, we'd have a definitive page on association.d.o, and not a random comment, that this links off to.

(When I say "prominently link" btw I mean something more like big honking green buttons ala https://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-2014-roadmap-brainstorming, rather than a small blue bit of text.)

- (Random unrelated bug) At http://vote-association.redesign.devdrupal.org/user/5/edit I still see the "Add your nomination" button, and it goes to a 404 page.

- (Major bug) The interstitial "You have NOT completed your vote yet" page needs that warning to be MUCH bigger, maybe flashing, bright magenta, etc. because otherwise you're literally disenfranchising people. Can we remove this step altogether, and instead move it to the voting results page at http://vote-association.redesign.devdrupal.org/election/1 next to the undo link? That way I could also go back and revisit how I voted if I forget between day 1 and day 4 (which I probably will).

Comment from Megan re: voting:

pretty good! No real comments from me. I think the Thank You page is short and sweet. It could probably remind you of where to go to find out the winner(s) and when.

Last comment - from Steph El Hajj

not a lot of other countries have th and rd

the wording on the confirmation / undo page is a bit unclear
maybe to word it around,'you can still change your vote before the deadline' or something
undo by itself is ... unclear.

also there's a floating "." on the first line

Summarizing feedback from vote test to the following recommendations:

Update Voting page text to read:

How to Vote: To vote, you will rank candidates in order of your preference (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.). The results will be calculated using an 'instant runoff' method. For an accessible explanation of how instant runoff vote tabulation works, check out this video.
Know Your Candidates: Don't forget to review the candidates before you make your votes! Read their statements and find out how they responded to community inquiries.
Ready to Vote? The following candidates are standing for the position Drupal Association At Large director (2 vacancies):
Voting Grid goes here with some white space before it please

Add buttons in third column next to text to read:

• Review the nominations (link to http://association.drupal.org/nominations)
• Learn about IRV voting (link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA3_t-08Vr0&feature=related)

You have not completed your vote yet

• The interstitial "You have NOT completed your vote yet" page needs that warning to be MUCH bigger, maybe flashing, bright magenta, etc. because otherwise you're literally disenfranchising people.

Confirmation page:

• also there's a floating "." on the first line (Steph reported this, but I can not replicate. Worth checking though.
• Please update text on confirmation page to read: Thank you for voting for the position Drupal Association At Large director. Votes will be tallied and ratified by the Drupal Association board on 22 September, 2013. Election results will be announced publicly at the 25 September Board meeting.

I simplified the "Voting process" section of the issue summary to make vote opening and closing times more clear:

• The times are one minute before or after midnight to make end of day or start of day clear.
• I removed two copies of the times so there is only a single set.

These are now scheduled at https://association.drupal.org/election/3/edit so voting will auto open and close.

Simplify voting turn on/off

I also added the URL https://association.drupal.org/vote2014, which is all set up and ready to go.

Add URL

“button name” is now “Confirm”: http://drupalcode.org/project/association_drupalorg.git/commit/70ade00

In the summary, I replaced the voting and confirm help texts with the specific issue for them.

More voting process cleanup

electorate update

Sticking this here so it's on our servers.

thank you page

did that

Some things I did:

• Updated the texts to match #33.
• Set up redirect after voting.

Except for the vote button on most pages, including candidate pages, which is the "Vote for the 2013 At-Large Directors" block, I think this is ready.

more updates

Closing out this issue, as this election has ended.