Diara, an open source application allowing public administrations to us the Internet to organise polls, referendums, petitions, public inquiries and allowing to record electronic votes using electronic ID cards, is developed with support from the city of Tallinn and the College of Technology in Estonia.
A first version of Diara was made available at the OSOR Forge, the OSOR's software development website last week. Says Hillar Põldmaa, one of the developers, Diara: "We just finished the registration, and we are now starting to upload the code of the application, including the English documentation." The Estonian version is already available on Google's forge.
The application is written in Java and requires a Java application server. It is developed by K5Security, an Estonian IT security firm. It makes use of JDigiDoc, open source Java libraries developed by the Openxades project.
According to Põldmaa, one of the developers, Diara was used for the first time last March, when the city of Tallin wanted the citizen's input on cultural spending. Diara was used by a select group of cultural and IT specialist to prioritise between spending on a local concert hall or a local theatre.
Põldmaa: "Citizens will be able to use Diara for the first time next January. We are still looking for a suitable poll, probably something related to Tallin being the cultural capital in 2011."
Diara at the moment only works with the Estonian electronic ID-card. However Põldmaa hopes that developers of other e-ID will join the project. "We hope that our project will be used in other European countries too."
That is one of the reasons that the software is published using the European Union's public software licence, EUPL. "We choose that licence ourselves. It best suits our project, for it is available in all but one European languages."
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