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2021/01/25

Elections

 It's intense these days.  I keep saying that the marathon has just turned into a sprint.  Adventurer's Project has been asked to be ready for chapterhood conversion by sometime in April.  I don't know the date, but that doesn't diminish the fact that I know it's coming.  It's kind of like reverse logic that some people don't understand.  The bottom line:

IT'S IMMINENT.

There's a first time for everything.  We've been having some glitches with this election.  The first is when I address Adventurer's Project's Facebook page in the first person point of view, Facebook won't let me post as myself on the page.  I can comment as myself, but I can not post.  So, I have to write a post on my personal profile, set it to public and then share it to the page.  Well, it's been having some problems with that over the last few weeks.  At some time during nominations, or the first election, as the Project Lead, I declared the election to be open.  But I didn't realize that this post didn't share to the page until the morning after.  I then corrected it, but it was about 12 hours late.

We have BTA members and registered project chapterside supporters who aren't on Facebook.  So they're getting the link to the ballot via e-mail.  Well, that's something else.  I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my e-mails.  It's a competitor to Microsoft Outlook.  And I had gContactSync, an add on installed.  But my version of Thunderbird was updated and now it doesn't support the add on and from what I'm seeing, there's no work around for it except to export the contacts in gMail, then import them in Thunderbird.

I'm use to working with Thunderbird.  But with the gContactSync now out of commission, I have to use gMail now.  I've made this one mistake twice already.  My recipients should not know each others address because if one of their e-mails were hacked, it could use those address and send SPAM to them?  Instead, I should use the Before Carbon Copy (BCC).  I forgot to do that once.  And with announcing this run-off election, this time I got smart.  I have a dual monitor setup in my home office.  I had two browser windows open, one on each monitor. I set up one with the opening of the election on Facebook and gMail while I continued to work on the other one.

It was a great idea.  I got both messages prepared 2 hours ahead of time.   It could have sent both in about 4 seconds?  But then I got the wise idea that I should test the link to the ballot to make sure that it will work.  That entailed logging out of all of my Google accounts.  I tested it and it worked... great.  But when I did that, the window with the email lost connection to gMail's server.  I copied the text, then refreshed the page, pasted it back in.  But guess what, when I entered the mailing lists in, I forgot to use the BCC and it was done in the TO line instead, which now everybody will be able to see every email address that it was sent to.

I had to test the run-off ballot because I had a problem with the first election's one.  On both occasions, I've run anonymous elections because I didn't want to know the names of the people and how they voted.  But we have Google Workplace, or what use to be known as the gSuite.  So we get some products that come along with that.  So, I ran both elections with a Google Form.  But when you create them, for occasions like this, you have to make sure that you set the permissions so that anybody with the link can fill out the form.  But then there's a second step to turn off the need to log into a Google account to submit it.  And the problem with the first election is that I didn't turn that off until my #2 person on the project told me that after I posted it to Adventurer's Project's Facebook page, she couldn't do something with it.

Well, this ship is getting shook down.  And like the Navy, it's producing some loose nuts and bolts.  But the good news is that we're not even a charted chapter yet and Adventurer's Project, which is designed to be the predecessor to the proposed chapter is the thing that should be doing the shaking down.

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