Developing EML OSI core foundation tools

["David Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Team,

It's been a frustrating week here in the USA, watching the machinations of
the US vendors and stakeholders as part of the HAVA/TGDC process;
the State officials are panicing about compliance for the 2006 elections,
and NIST has not been able to stand up a make real recommendations
without anything first being approved by the vendor engineering teams!

Essentially all attempts at introduce real progress on trusted mechanisms
at the foundation of the voting process have been stymied.  Along with
attempts to introduce EML XML as even an optional solution for
implementing in obvious areas of the process - such as voting records
themselves.

Example - VVPAT has made promising progress legislatively - with over
20 Sates having pending legislation to require it.  

Enter the vendors - with their minimalist market-driven thinking.  
Upshot is proprietary plexi-glass sealed printers
that capture voting logs into the a sealed bin as part of the DRE unit.
Needless to say these units are an order of magnitude more expensive
than a regular simple printer.

And sealed pritners fails true VVPAT on multiple levels; fails to 
enspire any trust whatsoever for voters (just more of the same in terms 
of hidden process); and also fails many of the principles of 
OASIS EML around voter privacy, etc, that came from the 
EU requirements.  Apart from those singificant short comings - the 
way the US is intending to allow VVPAT to be
implemented is a marvellous idea...

The long and the short of this is that it has become clear to me that
OASIS EML next requires a solution toolkit that is open source.

We have learned this from ebXML Registry and ebXML Messaging.
Both have OSI foundation components - that solution providers can
then take and deliver commercial solutions by tailoring to their local
marketplace needs.

I would therefore like to hear from members here who would like
to work with us here in the USA (the IEEE team and the OVC
- Open Voting Consortium - http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/)
and develop this as a SourceForge project.

I would also be interested in seeing if we can get EU funding for this,
and or donations of existing code components to form the underpinning.

I'm suspecting that new EU member countries especially would
benefit from a collaborative development effort to get this code
out there.  Also - does say the UK government own rights to
code it has funded already - that could form an initial 'seed' here?

A resource site hosted by the EU would also be great - but we
could also use OASIS resources to host a developer discuss list - 
again OASIS is already running several of those.

Assuming that Java is the target environment maybe
http://www.jEML.org if it is available - or similar - is what I'm 
envisioning here.

Thoughts?

Any takers out there?

Thanks, DW