By: E&P Staff SiliconValley.com, the technology-news Web site from Knight Ridder Digital, this week resurrects its Roundtables series with an online discussion of electronic voting.
The San Jose Mercury News-affiliated site ran several Roundtables in 2001 -- on topics like "Privacy Under Pressure" and "Does Apple Matter?" -- and hopes to run others later this year.
"E-Voting: Can we count on it?" features 13 commentators discussing the issue among themselves and replying to questions from readers, screened and approved an editor. The Roundtable launched Monday morning and will run through midday Friday.
Participants include Mercury News technology columnist Dan Gillmor, Mercury News reporter Elise Ackerman, who covers electronic-voting issues, and a variety of outside experts, including two county registrars of voters, several ballot-access activists, and a number of computer-science experts.
"For our readers, we're trying to offer a window into a conversation they might not otherwise have access to," John Paczkowski, a senior editor at SiliconValley.com, told E&P. By convening academics who think e-voting is "a massive accident waiting to happen" and registrars of voters who see a lot of advantages to the technology, Paczkowski said he and his colleagues are "trying to add a little light to all the heat that's been raised around the issue of e-voting."
The earlier Roundtable were "really successful events," Paczkowski said, which "fell by the wayside" after a site redesign. SiliconValley.com had long been planning to bring back the feature, and e-voting seemed like a good topic with which to do so.
According to August Nielsen//NetRatings data, SiliconValley.com draws 139,000 unique visitors per month.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here