[EM] Announcing Electowidget 0.1.0

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi folks,

I'm proud to announce the first release of Electowidget, a plugin for
MediaWiki:

http://electorama.com/electowidget

Electowidget is designed to be an extremely flexible framework for
implementing many different web-based ballot designs, election tallying
methods, and output formats.  Supported election methods:

    * Approval
    * Copeland
    * Definite Majority Choice
    * Instant Runoff
    * Minmax (margins and wv)
    * Plurality
    * Range
    * Schulze (margins, wv and wv-mod [Debian])
    * Smith set

Additionally, it supports a "chain" method, meaning that any two methods
can be chained together, such that ties in one method can be resolved
using a second method (e.g. Smith//Minmax(wv) or Copeland//Instant
Runoff).

You can see Electowidget in action by looking at the examples listed
here:
http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Electowidget

More importantly, you can set up your own examples on the test wiki that
I've set up, without needing to install the software yourself.  Just
create a new page on the test wiki.  For example, if you want to create
an election called "Electoville City Council", just visit the following
URL:
http://wikitest.electorama.com/wiki/Election:Electoville_City_Council

...then click on the "edit" tab, and copy a configuration from one of
the examples.

You can use it either for conducting online polls, or for documenting
and comparing sample sets of ballots.

Feel free to ask questions on this list, or join the new mailing list
dedicated to discussing Electowidget issues:
http://lists.electorama.com/listinfo.cgi/electowidget-discuss-electorama.com

Enjoy!

Rob