Conflict of Interest Guidelines/Policy Draft - Feedback Please

I think scoping down this document to frame it in the context of decision-making that needs to be done privately or semi-privately by the governance groups sounds like a good use of this work. I would be +1 to that proposal.

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This is great.

(I think we don’t have to explicitly scope this to “private or semi-private” processes. While it is true that such issues are usually handled privately, it’d be good to apply this policy even in cases where they aren’t. So the phrasing proposed by Aleksandra works better without additional qualifications.)

Can we take that one sentence and add it somewhere in the top-level governance docs and call it a day?

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i think one of the core issues here is how we’re defining “conflict of interest”. it is, for example, in a package maintainer’s interests to maintain packages they use, and we want that to influence their decision making because it’s beneficial to the community. in less metaphorical terms, we don’t want to blanket ban acting in one’s own personal interests, we want to ban acting in a situation where one’s personal interests do not align with the interests of Fedora Project or the community (that is, where one’s personal interests conflict with their other interests; that’s what a conflict of interest is). until that’s properly spelled out (both in the lead and in the rest of the document) we’re going to be stuck papering around how we’ve defined the term to make it mean what we actually want it to mean, which is unacceptable for a policy document that could be used to prevent people from making contributions.

TL;DR: corporations have muddied the waters to the point where a lot of people seem to forget what “conflict of interest” actually means.

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I would be in favour of stripping back this document to, as @zbyszek and @bookwar suugests to a simple one line/sentence and adding it to the ‘making decisions’ sections of Fedora Council, Mindshare Committee and FESCo docs saying:

‘Private decisions related to access rights of a specific person in the Fedora Project, regarding Code of Conduct issues and other questions, should not be made by people who are directly involved in such a conduct.’

Or (from google gemini when I asked to make that sentence cleaner):

‘People directly involved in a Code of Conduct issue must not decide a person’s Fedora access rights’.

These are my personal proposals and dont reflect the collective Councils view…yet :stuck_out_tongue:

This sentence does not convey the intended meaning. Your original sentence was longer but accurate and clear.

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Thats good feedback, thank you @theprogram . I was unsure which would be best. Humans win again against gemini :raising_hands:

After today’s Council meeting, the following is proposed:

The Council will not move forward with the larger policy draft. Instead, we propose to add a section to the governance groups documentation (Council, FESCo, Mindshare) under ‘Making Decisions’ that reads:

Private decisions related to access rights of a specific person in the Fedora Project due to Code of Conduct issues or other questions may require mediation or oversight if there is a possible conflict of interest or direct involvement of one or more parties involved in the final decision (e.g., someone who made the report originally). In this case, the group should decide to request oversight from the FPL/FCA/FOA (whomever is appropriate or available).’

The Fedora Council welcomes any feedback you have on this option, and we will reasses this topic during our next meeting on 26 August before deciding on whether to officially propose changing the docs or not.

This new version is much longer, but somehow less apt. E.g. changing “Decisions” → “Private decisions” is superfluous. For the decision to matter, is presumably must be made public at some point. The original succinct and clear “not be made by people who are directly involved in such a conduct” is replaced by a “may require oversight … should decide to request oversight”. I think recusal is much better than requesting oversight. Since (contrary to the older very long version) this has been trimmed down to cover only some rare cases, where recusal would normally be expected, we can also cut down on the complicated process and let the body avoid the appearance of CoI internally without involving the Council and whonot. The Council always has the right and duty to perform supervision, this doesn’t need to be mentioned.

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How about a mix of the two?

Decisions regarding Code of Conduct issues and other questions, related to access rights of a specific person in the Fedora Project, should not be made by people who are directly involved in such a conduct. In some cases, oversight may be requested from the FPL/FCA/FOA (whomever is appropriate or available) to ensure fairness in the decision making.

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this seems like a fair mix between the two. it gets the problem and solution correct, and (as far as i can tell) does what we mean.