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

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 12:03 PM, Daniel Robbins <drobbins@××××××.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 9:55 AM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> The confusing thing about this is, how would we define "conflict of
>> interest"?
>>

Well, Google supplies this which seems reasonable:

"a situation in which a person is in a position to derive personal
benefit from actions or decisions made in their official capacity"

Organizations often have specific guidelines.  For example, at work if
I'm involved in a decision to select a vendor I would need to disclose
if I have any kind of business relationship with that vendor outside
of work.  Above a certain level in the company employees are required
to disclose membership on the boards of any other organizations (which
would include the Gentoo Trustees), though this does not automatically
get considered as a conflict.  Below that level I think any employee
has to disclose membership on the boards of companies that are
vendors/suppliers/customers of the company (again, not automatically a
conflict).  And of course I cannot receive gifts/etc from vendors
other than token stuff like pens/etc.

If Gentoo actually sold products and I was involved in a project at
work that was considering buying that product, I would have to
disclose that to my boss (right now my only official role is as a
Gentoo dev but I'd still prefer to be safe), and while I'd probably be
welcome to provide general feedback/etc and my own personal
recommendations, they would probably have somebody else sitting on the
group that makes the decision, and they probably would also not share
with me the bids of all the companies.  This actually would benefit me
in that I couldn't be accused of doing anything wrong.

A situation which is closer to what you're getting at is also often a
target of company rules, though I wouldn't classify this as a
conflict-of-interest.  At work there are policies in place where
certain actions require the involvement of two different people, such
as any action that involves a payment.  This isn't about conflict of
interest so much as just generally raising the bar for fraud so that
one person couldn't approve a vendor, approve an order from that
vendor, and approve payment against that vendor's invoice (at least
not as the sole approver).  If there were an actual conflict of
interest that person wouldn't be allowed to have any of those roles
for a particular purchase, but absent a conflict there is still a
desire to have a second person in the loop for some of those steps
just to make it harder to embezzle.

To the degree that we think that it makes sense to force there to be
more warm bodies involved in a QA/Comrel decision-appeal chain I could
see the value in reducing overlap.  IMO there are already a lot of
people involved though.

> Potentially, it might be good if a member could also request a person to
> abstain if they felt there was a conflict of interest.

Well, nothing stops anybody from requesting anything, the question is
whether this is binding.  You can't just leave it up to random
individuals to decide which specific Council/Trustee Members get to
vote on which issues, for reasons that I hope are obvious.

-- 
Rich