ppg-voting

This repo houses code to help conduct voting for the Pteridophyte Phylogeny Group (PPG) on taxonomic proposals for ferns and lycophytes.

Monthly ballot pipeline

Creating and tallying ballots is automated with {targets}. Each month, run:

targets::tar_make()

This will, in order:

1. Read ballot_state.yaml to figure out the next ballot to create and the next one to tally (always "last completed + 1 month", never today's date, so a busy or skipped month can never silently disappear from voting).
2. Fetch open GitHub issues labeled "taxonomic proposal" for the new ballot's submission month, create a Google Form for them via the Forms API, and draft (but not send) the announcement email.
3. Fetch responses for the ballot being tallied directly from the Forms API, check them against the PPG mailing list, tally votes, write results/ballot-<n>_results*.csv, and draft (but not send) the results email.
4. Update ballot_state.yaml to record what was just done.

If a submission month has no eligible proposals, no form is created and no ballot number is spent on it — the month is just marked checked, and the next run picks up the following month with the same ballot number it would have used anyway.

Manual steps that remain:

• Review each drafted email in the pteridogroup.no.reply@gmail.com Gmail drafts folder and send it yourself.
• Manually set a closing timer on each new form (Settings > Responses in the Forms UI) — the Forms API has no way to schedule this. tar_make() prints the deadline to use.

One-time setup:

1. Enable the Forms API in the Google Cloud project behind .secrets/client_secret*.json (in addition to Gmail/Sheets, already enabled).
2. Before running tar_make() for the first time, authenticate in your live R console (not inside tar_make() itself, since it runs targets in an isolated subprocess where a browser consent flow can't happen):

   source("R/google_forms.R")
   forms_token()

   Complete the browser consent for pteridogroup.no.reply@gmail.com. The token is cached in .secrets, so subsequent tar_make() runs can reuse it silently.

Weekly digest email

R/digest.R sends a weekly summary of open taxonomic proposals to the PPG mailing list. It runs automatically via GitHub Actions (.github/workflows/digest.yml) every Monday at 00:00 UTC, and can also be triggered manually from the Actions tab or with gh workflow run digest.yml.

One-time / as-needed setup:

The workflow authenticates as pteridogroup.no.reply@gmail.com using the same .secrets/ OAuth cache as the monthly ballot pipeline, reconstructed at runtime from GitHub Actions secrets:

• GMAIL_CLIENT_SECRET_JSON — base64 of .secrets/client_secret*.json.
• GMAIL_OAUTH_TOKEN_1 .. GMAIL_OAUTH_TOKEN_10 — the cached OAuth token, base64-encoded and split into chunks because it's too large (~260-350 KB) for a single GitHub secret (~48 KB limit).

If the cached token in .secrets/ needs to be (re)created — e.g. it was revoked, or this is a fresh checkout — authenticate locally first:

library(gmailr)
options(gargle_oauth_cache = ".secrets")
gm_auth_configure(path = list.files(
  ".secrets", pattern = "client_secret.*json", full.names = TRUE
))
gm_auth("pteridogroup.no.reply@gmail.com", cache = ".secrets")

Then push the result to GitHub with:

./scripts/set_gmail_oauth_secret.sh

This splits the token into the numbered secrets above and clears any unused slots left over from a previous, larger token. Run both steps on your host machine, not inside the dev container — the container has no browser for the OAuth consent step, and doesn't have gh installed.

License

All code is available under the MIT license