Conflict of Interest guidelines #513

Huge +1. I am in full support of creating this type of document. In a recent meeting with the FPL and FCA, we discussed this topic. AIUI, the Code of Conduct committee may not have the resources to drive this work, so I suggest the Council take ownership of crafting these guidelines and submitting them to the Code of Conduct Committee to review and ratify.

I will take this ticket to ensure this is being worked on, and will suggest the council action this as work to do during our upcoming f2f meeting in February and have a draft completed and ready for review from this meeting.

Metadata Update from @amoloney:

• Issue assigned to amoloney
• Issue tagged with: code-of-conduct, policies

I would like to propose making this ticket public, in order to more transparently track the development work on this ticket.

Fine by me, I mostly opened tickets as non-public to let the council handle how they wanted particular tickets to be

@pbrobinson Thanks for following up and ACKing. I will now make this ticket public, and add a new comment after making it public to create an email notification for repository watchers.

Metadata Update from @jflory7:

• Issue private status set to: False (was: True)

This ticket is now public.

Following the council meeting today, @jspaleta will draft that the council and community can provide feedback and iterate on via discussion.fedoraproject.org.

See minutes here https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meeting_matrix_fedoraproject-org/2025-06-18/fedora-council-meeting.2025-06-18-14.02.txt

Metadata Update from @amoloney:

• Issue assigned to jspaleta (was: amoloney)

During the Fedora Council meeting on July 2, 2025, @jspaleta confirmed he is drafting the Conflict of Interest policy. He expects to share the first version with the Council for asynchronous review ahead of the next meeting on July 16.

Action Items

• @jspaleta will share a first draft of the Conflict of Interest policy for Council review no later than July 16, 2025, to discuss at the next Council meeting.

Metadata Update from @jflory7:

• Issue marked as depending on: #538
• Issue tagged with: Next Meeting

I've got a draft google doc that can probably use some review.
Council members should have commenter/suggestion access.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QWLPur0G590GjhZXuYyZy2GYYaegM3VicbuaxX-pQ2s/edit?usp=sharing

This was discussed briefly at todays meeting. @jspaleta is working on a second draft for council review and will try to target the next council meeting on July 30 for feedback.

• Text log
• Text minutes
• HTML log
• HTML minutes

Metadata Update from @amoloney:

• Issue untagged with: Next Meeting
• Issue tagged with: In Progress

Update on this.

I'm in private consultation with legal about some aspects of the existing project procedures that materially read on conflict of interest policy details,

It's disappointing that after a year this still isn't resolved!

@jspaleta What happened with the draft? Did you end up getting some time with Legal to take a look at this? Anything we can do to help?

Right, so, there is a draft and we had one for a while. Several Council members left feedback in July 2025. @jspaleta did not resume work on it since then. Council members can access the draft version in this Google Doc. It is private to Council members at the moment, but related to #563, it is getting more attention. So, we should finish the job and get it proposed as a new Fedora Project policy and accept community input on the draft text.

Following up here since this connects directly to #563 (now resolved) — the Council is recommitting to finishing this policy, and it's worth summarizing where the draft actually stands for anyone picking this up.

A full draft already exists (private Google Doc, last substantively reviewed by Council members in July 2025) and covers:

• Purpose: a framework for identifying, disclosing, and managing actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest, so Council/committee decisions stay fair and impartial.
• Scope: which Fedora decision-making groups the policy applies to — the current draft leaves this somewhat broad (engineering teams, Mindshare teams, program management, etc.), and there's an open question of whether to start with a narrower, more concrete list of named bodies (Council, Mindshare Committee, FESCo, EPEL Steering Committee, etc.) and widen from there.
• Definition of Conflict of Interest: personal or organizational interests that could reasonably appear to bias someone's decisions on Fedora's behalf — this needs care given how many contributors, myself included, are also Red Hat employees.
• Core Principles: conflicts are expected and normal in a project like ours, individuals are expected to proactively disclose them, and having a conflict doesn't automatically disqualify someone or imply misconduct.
• Disclosure Process: declare a conflict as early as possible, with a level of publicity that matches the decision itself.
• Conflict Remediation: groups are encouraged to reach their own consensus on what's disqualifying and how to remediate, favoring the least restrictive fix.
• Conflict Escalation: if a group can't reach consensus, it escalates to the Council, which can mediate, make the final call on whether a conflict is disqualifying, and decide remediation (recusal, abstention, temporary removal, or public disclosure). The draft still needs to more clearly separate this from the Code of Conduct Committee's role — as the provenpackager case showed, it's easy for the two to get mixed together in practice.
• Compliance and Review: applies to all Fedora decision-making groups, with periodic Council review.

The draft needs a refresh before it's ready for the community — it's been about a year since anyone touched it, and it's now been over a month since we last discussed this at the June 3rd Council meeting, so this needs fresh attention soon.

_{Assisted-by: Claude Sonnet 5 (1M context)}

Part of the reason I requested this as a result of #563 was that, for example, a member of FESCo should not be participating/voting/influencing on a ticket that may benefit them, they should exclude themselves from all conversations to ensure a fair process for the project and all parties, what's more other members of the group should be able to identify it as well if the conflicted individual doesn't (I know RH does training for everyone on this).

@jflory7 thank you for the summary, this is great. I think this will benefit from a discussion at our next council meeting. Marking this ticket for that slot.

@pbrobinson thank you for your feedback. I slightly disagree with you on change proposals as I have seen FESCo members push back on changes that have been proposed by current members. I dont think the project has an unhealthy relationship with saying 'no' to something ;)
What I would like this policy to do, at its core, is to make certain that a person in a position of influence who has a complaint against another person is not part of a process or decision-making forum/framework that would result in a significant reduction in how the person they have filed a complaint against can contribute to the Fedora Project.

If you are available next Wednesday, your input on this topic would be very valuable but I know work/time commitments are hard so comments here will be taken into account as well, of course.

Hello.
I'll pick up the the draft and try to make adjustments based on new feedback.

For the record:

I am not convinced that we need a policy like this in general.

Even if yes, i would restrict it to more personal kind of issues, like Code of Conduct discussions. The Conflict of interest concept would cover the relationships only outside of the technical disagreement on the features or implementation of certain technical things in the project.

As an example, I think it is ok to have a specific technical interest in a certain topic and apply to be elected to FESCo to push for this topic in Fedora.

I am of the opinion we need something for groups in Fedora to help them when they need to make hard decisions, but I think we might have been too heavy handed in the current draft. My understanding is this policy should really only help groups like FESCo, Council, Mindshare and Code of Conduct when they need to hold a vote to reduce or remove someones ability to contribute to the project. For example:

If I file a CoC ticket, and I am also on the CoC Committee, I theoretically would/should recuse myself from the decision that's made against the person/people that my issue is filed against. This is because I would have the influence or power to potentially sway the vote in my favour.

What we have written is a heavier set of guidelines that makes it applicable to everyone, in every situation, and actually might undermine the Code of Conduct Committee inadvertently. I think I would like to run a poll on discourse to see if there is a need for a beefy conflict of interest policy (similar to what we have) or if we just need a light framework for voting in instances like my example.

My example is made up. I am not on the code of conduct committee.

The current conflict of interest policy draft is moved to here for now https://hackmd.io/@Ap8CkTlpSfmjb44UGV-kWA/SkpcQt8Nfx

I think the conflict of interest policy is pretty solid -- I might recommend writing specific instructions on how to escalate to the Council, but otherwise I don't have any problems with it as written.

The draft has now been shared to discourse for more feedback https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/conflict-of-interest-guidelines-policy-draft-feedback-please/197508

Thank you @jsmith for your feedback too!

This came up as part of Open Floor in the council meeting yesterday[1], and was decided to redraft the current document and allow a further 2 weeks for feedback. We will discuss this at the next council meeting on 13 Aug, 2026.

@amoloney will redraft the document.

[1] https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/meeting_matrix_fedoraproject-org/2026-07-29/fedora-council-bi-weekly-meeting.2026-07-29-14.00.html