On 2022/06/01 06:57, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
I think now might be a reasonable time to suggest that we revisit our ban on allowing DPL delegates to work for cloud providers. The rationale for it is a concern over potential conflicts of interest, which is entirely valid. However, experience over the past several years has provided ample evidence that the opportunities for such conflicts of interest to actually impair the judgement of a delegate are very rare. As long as a delegate's relationship to their employer is known ahead of time, that delegate can recuse themselves from any specific decision making process that may be influenced by their employer.
IMHO some people in Debian have been overly concerned about conflicts of interest. It's true that we should be mindful of them, and that people should declare when they do arrive at a situation where there's a conflict of interest, but when it comes to the cloud team and volunteers working for cloud providers, it seems that for the most part, interests are well aligned.
That said, I wouldn't want the whole cloud team to work for a single vendor. Would it be enough to limit membership in the cloud team, say, at most one person in the cloud team who works for any vendor/cloud provider/etc?
If that works, then I can update the delegation. As it is now, this delegation is a bit of a snowflake since we don't have such a clause in other delegations (which aren't any more or less subject to conflict of interest than this one).
Either way I'll go ahead and start with the draft, looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
-Jonathan