Conflict of Interest policy, 1 March 2012 draft

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Thanks to all of you for convening on this list.  I'm excited that we
have more than half the Conservancy projects' represented here!

I know "internal polices" can be a boring topic, but we really do want
to make sure our member projects have an opportunity to give input into
our formal policies that we'll be setting -- the first being the
Conflicts of Interest policy.

Attached please find our first draft of Conservancy's Conflict of
Interest Policy.  But, before you read it, I want to summarize briefly
some of our design goals:

 * As much as possible, we wanted to have the same policy apply to
   Conservancy staff, officers, and directors as apply to Project
   Leadership.

 * We specifically wanted to address the issue that some Project leaders
   are paid as contractors by Conservancy to develop software.

 * We wanted to have a policy that was a bit more detailed and complete
   than the very simple one the IRS (USA tax authority) recommends.
   From a non-profit perspective, we could have just adopted the IRS
   recommends, but our feeling was we wanted to try for something that
   really represented issues that we know come up with Conservancy.

I understand fully that this draft is legalese.  Tony and I made some
efforts to make it less so, and we may ultimately want to have an FAQ to
go along with it.  Part of this process should be to figure out what
questions you have, and develop that FAQ to go along with it.

Meanwhile, if you feel that it needs changes, or you have rewrites that
will make it more readable, we welcome them.

The timeline is somewhat tight, as we need to establish at a Conservancy
Board meeting in March.  However, no policy will be set in stone -- I
expect this list will become a permanent fixture at Conservancy, where
member project leadership can propose changes to various policies and
we can discuss them together.


I've converted the document to asciidoc (for lack of a better
PDF-outputable ASCII format that could handle back-references well).  I
wanted a pure-ASCII format that we can easily diff/patch it, and I hope
you'll propose changes to this list if you have them so we can discuss.
(It was in LaTeX, but I feared some on the list might not like or know
how to edit LaTeX.)

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to discussing this with all of
you!

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Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy