61RZ09 - The Database: End Of An Era Act

WHEREAS the National Database has now been successfully replaced, as shown by the near-flawless running of the 61st Cosa election;

and WHEREAS when the reason for a law ceases, so should the law itself;

BE IT ENACTED by the King, Senäts and Cosa of Talossa in Ziu assembled that El Lexhatx C.1.2.1 and C.1.2.1.1, which currently read:

1.2.1. One member of the Chancery shall be the Royal Data Clerk, heading the Office of Dynamic Data Management. The function of the Office of Dynamic Data Management is to manage all computer records owned by the Kingdom of Talossa for its official functions and delegated to its care in order to help other Royal Households, Ministries or any other organization of the Kingdom which needs data management. The Royal Data Clerk may be the same person as the Secretary of State. The Royal Data Clerk shall be considered an Officer of the Royal Household.

1.2.1.1. Once the first Royal Data Clerk accepts his position, and once two members of the Cort pü Inalt have confirmed that they are in receipt of full and accessible backups of the database system currently hosted on talossa.ca, this database shall be considered to be the property of the Office of Dynamic Data Management and thus, the property of the Kingdom of Talossa.

are hereby repealed and replaced by the following:

1.2.1. The Chancery may avail itself of a database system comprising a website and database backend, in order to facilitate the storage of information and records, the management of citizenship rolls, the operations of the Ziu, the holding of elections and censuses, and any other function which is delegated to or administered by the Chancery. This database system and all the data it manages shall be considered to be the property of the Kingdom of Talossa.

FURTHERMORE, it is the Sense of the Ziu:

• that such a database system should be hosted on national property;
• that if self developed, its source code should be made open as soon as practical, roughly coinciding with a state of "stable release";
• that if not self developed, the chosen software preferably be free and open source;
• that the underlying data should be appropriately backed up;
• that the Chancery should inform the citizenry whenever appropriate, regarding changes in features, hosting, policies and regulations;
• that regardless of the actual officials in charge of technical maintenance and/or development, the Secretary of State should always have full access to all parts of the database;
• that the Chancery should provide for redundant superuser access, and therefore, that more than one user should be able to manage all subsystems directly from the web interface;
• that any and all balloting systems should be engineered so to make impossible to reveal a voter's choices even to administrators, if chosen to be secret, except for investigating on potential irregularities as provided by law or directed by the Judiciary;
• that any and all balloting systems should provide "receipt" tools for the verification of any voter's choices by the voter themselves.

Noi urent q'estadra så,
Dame Miestră Schivă (MC-¡Avant!)
Sir Lüc da Schir (Secretary of State)