Today I spent the day on Capitol Hill, presenting the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation to the 12th Annual Tech Exhibition of the Congressional Internet Caucus. OSDV is a non-profit foundation working to build open source solutions for voter and election management, as a way to increase the transparency of elections, restore confidence in the vote, and reduce the cost to states and counties to implement such systems.

The application we were showing was one we’ve been developing with them for the past 8 weeks, an online voter registration tracking system, called Reggie. It’s designed to help eligible voters to register to vote, and to track their registration process; and to give registrars greater oversight and auditability.

By applying agile methods and leveraging Ruby on Rails, we were able to deliver a fully test-driven alpha product in just 8 weeks from the initial scoping meeting, during the holiday season, with a single pair of developers.

OSDV has had serious interest from a number of State Secretaries and registrars, and hopes to pilot with at least one state in the coming months.

Pivotal-developed projects like this one, Peer to Patent, and Casebook apply modern web technologies to improve the efficiency and transparency of government. We’re proud to work on projects like this one, and to be an agent for change.