TrustTheVote on GitHub — New Beginnings

 

 

As we start a new phase of election technology development at the TrustTheVote Project, it’s time to correct an oversight about another new beginning — the work that we started last year to move our source code within GitHub. Here’s the where, what, and why.

Where

The new home of the TrustTheVote Project on github is here at:

https://github.com/TrustTheVote-Project

That’s the main page for a GitHub Project that houses most of the TTV source code. From there you can find all the repos of released code.

What

These repositories (“Repos”) are source code for TTV components (for example, the Voter Services Portal or our elections results analytics component, VoteStream), or common subsystems that have been factored out for re-use among multiple components (the repos named starting with VED, for example, comprise standalone reusable code for managing election results data using the U.S. national standard data format).

Why

Two main reasons.

1. github.com added a “project” as a first class item in addition to the more familiar ones like repo and user; projects are more handy for managing collaborations and the new norm for doing so, rather than having a “super user” managing an ad-hoc group of Repos and collaborators.
2. The old TrustTheVote super-used account on github.com had grown cluttered. This was a fine opportunity to move to TrustTheVote-Project all the Repos of code for actual TTV election technology components, and leave behind various odds and ends no longer under active development.

One more related point: if you go to github.com and search there, by default the search is limited to Repos, not project or users.  So you will find Repos with names that sort of match “trustthevote” but you won’t find the project described above, which collects all the Repos together. The fact that github.com’s search doesn’t include by default projects or users is a bit odd.  So, if you want to see actual TrustTheVote Project source code, please don’t search github, but do go directly to https://github.com/TrustTheVote-Project.