search

NixOS / foundation

This is the home of the NixOS Foundation
62 stars 16 forks source link

policies: add Conflict of Interest policy #40

Open zimbatm opened 1 year ago

zimbatm commented 1 year ago

This is something I had on my mind lately.

I want to avoid future conflicts of interest seeping into the foundation's organizational structure as this is distracting and damaging to both our group and the community.

nixos-discourse commented 10 months ago

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixcon-governance-workshop/32705/9

rhendric commented 2 months ago

What happens if a non-disclosure agreement forbids someone subject to this policy from revealing their conflict of interest?

delroth commented 2 months ago

What happens if a non-disclosure agreement forbids someone subject to this policy from revealing their conflict of interest?

"I will recuse myself from this [discussion|decision] due to biases and conflicts of interest that I'm not able to elaborate on." seems like something that board members should trivially respect?

If you've signed an NDA that would prevent you from doing even that then IMO the only reasonable solution is resigning from the board.

rhendric commented 2 months ago

It seems to me like

  1. Transparency: The foundation leading the open source project must disclose any conflicts of interest to the project's community.

is asking for a preemptive disclosure, not just an expectation to recuse oneself in a just-in-time manner.

thufschmitt commented 2 months ago

Re: preemptive disclosure or not: I think there should be a gradient here. Major potential sources of conflicts of interests (direct employer for instance) should be explicit ahead of time, but there's a bazillion potential sources of conflicts of interests that can't be made explicit ahead-of-time. An extreme example of that: I'm friend with X, and for whatever reason, X gets in troubles which bubbles up to the Foundation board. I now have a conflict of interest, and I expect this policy to require me to state it, but it's not something I could have disclosed beforehand.

thufschmitt commented 2 months ago

Re: preemptive disclosure or not: I think there should be a gradient here. Major potential sources of conflicts of interests (direct employer for instance) should be explicit ahead of time, but there's a bazillion potential sources of conflicts of interests that can't be made explicit ahead-of-time. An extreme example of that: I'm friend with X, and for whatever reason, X gets in troubles which bubbles up to the Foundation board. I now have a conflict of interest, and I expect this policy to require me to state it, but it's not something I could have disclosed beforehand.

Actually, a more immediately applicable example (at least to me): Any Modus client I'm sufficiently involved with is a potential conflict of interest, but listing all of them is not possible (both because of NDA, and because it's a very fuzzy and moving target)

rhendric commented 2 months ago

In such cases, would it be reasonable to propose something like this?

If not, aside from direct employers, what other sorts of conflict of interest would merit preemptive disclosure?

thufschmitt commented 2 months ago 
* Works for AwesomeCorp, which does consulting for 10–20 clients in the financial, food services, and consumer goods sectors

Yes, I think that could make sense. I have no idea how many clients my company have though, so it would be s/10-20/many :p

If not, aside from direct employers, what other sorts of conflict of interest would merit preemptive disclosure?

Right now, nothing applicable comes to my mind. But it's probably good to keep this open to err on the extra-transparency side.

nixos-discourse commented 2 months ago

This pull request has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-foundation-event-sponsorship-policy/43110/55

refroni commented 2 months ago

My apologies, misclicked as I was catching up.

refroni commented 2 months ago

Another example for conflict of interest: Holding considerable stake, position, or equity in an entity that is involved with the topic or community - A standard example is if we are reviewing infra vendors and someone suggests using a smaller provider where they might hold equity, that should be disclosed and the relevant party should abstain from the decision.