Re: [Debconf-team] Special sponsorship
Hi Micah,
On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 10:21:56PM +0200, micah anderson wrote:
> I wasn't aware that there was a SPI election going on, nor did I know
> that Clint was running, or you running again. Thanks for the mention,
> I'll have a look at the candidates and be sure to vote!
Great!
> I can understand how you might think that some people who are listening
> may be negatively influenced by things you might say about another
> candidate, and excusing yourself for the purposes of avoiding this
> conflict of interest might seem like the honorable thing to do. However,
> with that said, I would appreciate if anything you would say in this
> matter were said without holding back out of fear of being viewed as an
> attempt to sabotage a political campaign. Personally, I prefer the
> actual information from a candidate rather than a clear message that a
> candidate is politiking by not saying things that would otherwise be
> said outside of a campaign.
>
> It is especially problematic to claim conflict of interest when the
> precisely the issue at hand seems to be about conflict of interest.
Well, I didn't hold back in anything that I said about DebConf tracking
donations for Clint, nor in my comments about SPI being the conduit. I simply
declined to publicly discuss the specific travel sponsorship decision process
about him, since I didn't want people to think it was more personal (or more
political) than it was. The things I was holding back on were related purely to
DebConf herb and not to SPI-related matters.
As well, Tolimar said most of what needed to be said, though he left it
ambiguous whether Clint simply forgot to fill in the field or gave an answer
that wasn't minimally sufficient.
Since Clint's situation has been discussed in such a public way already, I
guess I will add that he did give an answer, but not only was it vague enough
that it neither addressed his contributions to Debian nor his financial need,
it also could have been 100% literally applicable to almost every attendee of
the conference, including ones like Mark Shuttleworth (I know he isn't coming
this year) who don't need travel assistance as well as those who do.
I'll leave any public quoting of his response to others if they feel it is
appropriate, but in short, he neither overlooked/misread the field nor
attempted to give even a minimally useful answer. If we had applied our
personal knowledge of his contributions together with a trust that he would not
request unnecessary sponsorship, that would have been very unfair to those with
whom the team was less familiar, or at least created legitimate accusations of
unfairness.
None of this was intended as a personal slight by me or the other team members,
and speaking personally for a moment I am glad he was able to attend.
> > 2) As Phil suspects, it would cause problems for SPI to be the conduit of those
> > payments. No US 501(c)(3) charity can accept donations specifically earmarked
> > by the donor for the private benefit of a specific individual. I have no ill
> > will toward Clint and am only pointing this out because as an SPI board member
> > I'm required to try to keep SPI out of tax trouble. I'm sure someone can figure
> > out an alternate way to track or aggregate the donations. If nothing else it
> > could simply be gathering cash, US checks, or future money transfer pledges at
> > DebConf and working with Richard to make sure the money is tracked and gets to
> > Clint.
>
> Is it not true that it would be considered, at minimum, a conflict of
> interest if board members of a 501c3 organization were found funneling
> money to themselves? I would think that it would raise significant
> questions with an auditor who might be looking at an organization's
> taxes.
>
> If that is true, then it seems to me a clear conflict of interest that
> board members who requested funding not only got perfect scores, but
> also rated themselves with perfect scores. Wouldn't it appear, from the
> outside, like board members are essentially giving themselves money when
> they ranked themselves perfectly? Or when a husband ranked a wife with a
> perfect score or vice versa?
In this case, before I agreed to serve on the travel sponsorship committee, I
expressed reluctance to do so based on this exact concern, and didn't want to
create the appearance of a conflict of interest. I was told that this issue had
been discussed before in prior years' iterations of that team, and that it had
been decided previously (not by me) that it team members should not refrain
from rating themselves because that would penalize them for contributing to
DebConf in exactly the kind of ways that the travel sponsorship is supposed to
recognize. I think this is because number of ratings may have been one of the
ranking tiebreakers - Joerg Jaspert can say more about how that works.
It was made clear that, if other team members thought that the requests were
unreasonable, they could, should, and would rate me down. Only with this
understanding, and after asking those questions, did I agree to help rate. For
the record, not every travel sponsorship requestor on the herb team got perfect
scores, so this wasn't theoretical.
Where the vast majority of the decision is made by people other than the
benefiting board members, and those directors have proactively disclosed,
expressed concern about, and sought to avoid the conflict of interest, I don't
think it would trouble auditors. That is what happened here, and similar
procedures for decisions made by the board are outlined in most nonprofit
corporation law statutes including New York's. The issue with donors earmarking
donations for specific individuals is different and relates to the criteria set
out by the Internal Revenue Code for 501(c)(3) status.
However, if it troubles Debian or DebConf as a whole, I can give back my
sponsorship despite the fact that I think I did try hard to avoid
improprieties, make a reasonable request, provide lots of financial-need and
contribution-based justifications, and pay as much as I could. (I am paying
more than half of my own travel cost, am currently a student with expensive
tuition and small freelancing income, and have arranged with Daniel Baumann to
get significantly involved in Debian Live during DebConf11.)
If the travel sponsorship BoF wants to come up with a fair way to rate herb
team members' own requests without penalizing them for their herb team
participation, I would welcome that.
> I believe any of those would be considered either as either vested
> interest, nepotism, malfeasance, or at minimum a strong reason for
> excusing oneself for conflict of interest out of concern over causing
> tax problems for the organization.
>
> If we want to keep debconf and debian out of tax trouble, a committee
> designed to execute a process that allocates money between themselves
> isn't how its done.
>
> Calling this a simple mistake is ignoring a very serious concern.
As I have said, when transactions are made between any personally interested
board member and the corporation at question, both the law and best practices
urge procedures relatively similar to what happened here. I agree that
conflicts of interest should be avoided as much as possible, including
appearances of conflicts. That is exactly why we didn't special-case Clint
based on personal knowledge, and the reason why I made the inquiries I did
before joining this year's herb team.
- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy@debian.org
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