[gentoo-council] Improving Council operations with a web application

[Petteri Räty]

http://gentoocouncil.petteriraty.eu/

I have a couple times said that the council could make use of a web
application to handle things. In celebration of the holidays I did some
initial work to get feedback on the issue. I created a simple rails
application where you can create questions and vote on them if you are
registered and signed up. Here's what I am thinking for this to be truly
useful in no particular order:

1. use openid to authenticate council members via
http://dev.gentoo.org/~nick/

2. every gentoo developer may put issues for the council to vote on

3. handle agenda items for meetings

4. email notifications about new votes and if someone hasn't voted
inside some timeline

5. handle glep submission timelines automatically

Some benefits that come to mind:

1. easier to vote outside monthly meetings

2. security. Currently we don't really even check if council members are
authenticated on IRC and most of us probably don't use SSL to connect
there when authenticating.

3. People can find out votes before the official summary is done. I
think the summary should still go into CVS but this can make it easier
to create it

If you think this would be something that we could use, I can continue
to make this usable.

Regards,
Petteri