[Mailman-Users] Using Mailman to manage a voting process?

[Adam McGreggor]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 11:15:57AM +0000, Peter Hitchmough (Twokan) wrote:
> I am investigating approaches to manage a lightweight process to approve  
> documents for a shortlist. This process takes place several times a year  
> and has 20-30 interested parties and 1 administrator.
>
> A mailing list, particularly managed via Mailman, appeals to me. I have  
> glanced briefly at the Vote-MM add-in.

I've no knowledge of that.

> Mailing lists are often used to review things for publication but I  
> would like to automate the tracking. features I want to implement 
> include:

> - announcement of start, end of voting periods

Do-able via sending an email, perhaps with an iCal or similar
attachment, for people to add to their calendars?

> - announcement of new items for consideration

I presume, this will need some manual input, and not, say diff two
directories (previous / current), and mail that output out via cron,
or similar...

> - collecting Yes and No votes (possibly More Info Please votes)

Not too sure about this. I imagine that to collate this, some
discipline of list-members would be needed. TBH, I'd provide a link to
a script/google-(doc|form) for that. Validating entitlement to vote
could be done via GPG, or similar, I'd imagine. A lot depends on your
user-base.

> - announcing final result, including list of items approved

As above. Were I going with a script, it shouldn't be too difficult to
make the script do a SQL COUNT (assuming a SQL backend), for each
decision choice, and throw that out to an email.

Of course, if this is something that happens often (and 'several times
a year' is up to intepretation), it may be worth looking at automating
these stages. YMMV.



-- 
"Bernard: It's one of those irregularly declining words. 
 I have an independent mind, you are an eccentric, he’s round the twist."