Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: council members and appeals

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2018 at 12:51:45AM -0500, Alec Warner wrote:
> Ultimately this comes down to a discussion about whether potential
> conflicts are allowed or not.
...
> If you believe the above premise, even if we take William's patch, its
> clear we cannot eliminate conflicts of interest among Gentoo Leadership
> (e.g. the above example is a conflict; but it isn't resolved by William's
> patch.)
Your argument does make a potential point that even this patch won't
eliminate the conflicts of interest. These also exist between comrel/QA
another team: Infra.

As a data point, since I've been leading Infra (and the team is overdue
for another lead election), I've asked that new Infra members NOT act in
cases of potential conflict of interest: but instead choose a path that
discloses the conflict and recurses themselves temporarily.

Infra has members that are the comrel or QA teams, and I've made it
clear internally that if they take a side on a contentious issue from
those teams AND the issue requires infra to action something, the infra
member in question should NOT action it themselves except in an
emergency.

Instead, the team member should file a bug to it for the rest of infra
(if there isn't a bug already), and ask somebody else that's NOT on a
conflicting team to action the bug instead. The paper trail here in the
bug is valuable to help dispel any concerns of conflict of interest,
real or perceived.

This isn't codified anywhere as a 'rule' that infra members HAVE to
agree to, but I believe following it improves the professional behavior
within the Infra team.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux: Dev, Infra Lead, Foundation Treasurer
E-Mail   : robbat2@g.o
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