The GNU.FREE e-voting software was originally developed as part of a joint project at the University of
Warwick Department of Computer Science and the Warwick Business School. The project was examining the impact of the Information
Revolution on activism and the political process.
I had originally started looking at this area due to an interest in the impact of the Information Revolution on modern day conflict. After having
written a research paper on this (and absorbed reports from people like RAND, IBM etc etc) I realised that civilians were increasingly important in
conflict be it war or political or social.
For example: When the US military realised the importance of a strong, robust information infrastructure in the case of InfoWar they began to
look at what could be done to imporve resilience. They were shocked at how much of this important resource was totally handled, owned and
secured by civilians. So if the military want to succeed in the InfoWar they must work closely with and become very dependend on parts of the civilian
world.
So I began to look at other ways the growth in Information Technology were impacting the influence, importance and role of civilians in the large
nation state structure.
One major impact that people have been predicting for years is electronic voting, but during my research it became apparent that all the current
implementations were pretty flakey and also commercial. I felt this was an unacceptable state of affairs so I set about making a system that would be
useful with today’s technology and could be released under the General Public License. GNU.FREE is the result.
Download the Papers
People Power Essay. Looks at the increasing role civilians and thus NGOs play in decision making due to technology and where this
could go in the future.
PDF file (2.2Mb)
People Power Technical Documents. Describes and explains the design decisions for FREE before reporting on problems faced during
implementation and testing.
Feel free to quote this work. The People Power papers were produced 1999-2000 by Jason Kitcat.
Jason Kitcat 