Since we last spoke, my good friend Karen Suhaka convinced me to come on a bit of a mad dash with her…

The idea is called MyFairElection, and the “X for Y” version of the description is “Yelp for polling places”.

So to be successful - we need to build a site that’s usable and robust, than can deal with a number of weird corner cases in how states and jurisdictions deal with voting, and that can scale up to thousands of polling places and potentially millions of users.

It’s just a little bit audacious, and has a hard deadline fixed by law.

We’re in the initial building stages now. The decision we need to make in the next 2 weeks will be whether we think we can make it; if not, the backoff is to have it ready for a smaller election sometime in 2013, with the aim of building the brand for the big national elections in 2014 and 2016.

In terms of technology - starting with Rails and MySQL, with hosting provided by Rackspace. Trying to be uber-BDD - but then I just threw Devise into the thing without writing a single test. The adventure will continue…