User:RobLa

I am Rob Lanphier (a.k.a. "RobLa"). See https://robla.net for more general-purpose information about me. Now for the Electowiki-specific stuff:

Starting Electowiki

main: Electowiki:About

I founded electorama.com in 2003, and started wiki.electorama.com with User:DanKeshet in 2005 (I paid the hosting bills; DanKeshet actually set it up, calling it "Electowiki"). Then DanKeshet left it in my hands late in 2005, and I did a lot of MediaWiki contracting work, culminating in a day job as Director of Open Source for Linden Lab. Part of my day job at Linden Lab was maintaining a MediaWiki-based wiki at wiki.secondlife.com, so maintaining wiki.electorama.com didn't seem too hard. Plus I had lots of volunteer help. Then I left my day job at Linden Lab in 2009, and did a lot of MediaWiki plugin development (and spent way too much time trying to fix Mediawiki bug 4421, which was migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator by my team at Wikimedia Foundation, but is still open as Phab task T6421). Then I tried to keep wiki.electorama.com up and running while I worked at Wikimedia Foundation trying to keep Wikipedia up and running. Between 2006 and 2018, spambots made it almost impossible to have an open wiki, so I kept restricting access to Electowiki, and wasn't able to figure out how to make my clever web-of-trust plugins for MediaWiki work.

User:Psephomancy bugged me for a year, starting in 2017, which ultimately culminated in them snarfing the content off of wiki.electorama.com and hosting it at electowiki.miraheze.org. I saw the ported site, and said to myself "ooo...nice work!". I put the porting work of Electowiki on hold during my 2019 dayjob, but I've done a lot more work since then (especially in 2020). I've joined the Miraheze board, and I try to help out every so often. And I'm a frequent contributor to Electowiki.

More information about me can be found on my homepage (robla.net) or over on m:User:RobLa (the main user page for me on miraheze.org) .

Journal

This part will soon be transcluded from User:RobLa/Journal

This is going to be where keep a journal of my Electowiki-related thoughts and ideas. Sort of like a blog, but I have a blog at https://robla.blog , and that's where I do my "blogging". This will be my journal writing about Electowiki-related stuff

My journal contains my electoral reform thoughts generally, and might not be specific to Electowiki

2020

2020-05-04

May the 4th be with you! I have some thoughts about how we should talk about Burlington 2009. I plan to capture them at User:RobLa/Burlington2009.

2020-04-22

In 2020, I've had a few things that I'd like to do with Electowiki. My main role so far has been:

1. Primary liaison with Miraheze. The site doesn't host itself, and the Miraheze SRE team does an amazing job ensuring the site stays usable. See more about my Miraheze work over at meta:User:RobLa/TODO.
2. Continuing my role as bureaucrat and administrator for Electowiki.

See User:RobLa/TODO if you're interested in my Electowiki TODO list.

2019

During most of 2019, I was focused on my role as Director of Core Infrastructure at Internet Archive (IA). When I left IA in November, I wrote my "End of a Chapter" blog post on November 5.

In November and December, my activity here on Electowiki really picked up. Additionally, I started speaking with the folks at Miraheze, and by the end of the year, it became clear that I was joining the Miraheze board. See my blog post about the history of Electowiki and my involvement with Miraheze (titled "Why donate to a non-profit with a hard-to-pronounce name?") for a detailed history of why I got into electoral reform and found myself working with Miraheze.

2018

2018 was the year that User:Psephomancy did 90% of the work migrating Electowiki over to Miraheze, and I puttered around for the next year or so doing the last 10%. When it was mostly moved over, I started using Miraheze as a place for drafting up my ideas for MAF and MATT.

MAF and MATT

A couple of new voting systems I worked on in late 2018 as possible alternatives to California's jungle primary:

• Majority approval filter (MAF)
• Maximum approval top-two (MATT)

...and a draft thing:

• User:RobLa/runoff