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Excerpts from Zane Bitter's message of 2018-06-04 17:41:10 -0400:
> On 02/06/18 13:23, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > Excerpts from Zane Bitter's message of 2018-06-01 15:19:46 -0400:
> >> On 01/06/18 12:18, Doug Hellmann wrote:
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> >>> Is that rule a sign of a healthy team dynamic, that we would want
> >>> to spread to the whole community?
> >>
> >> Yeah, this part I am pretty unsure about too. For some projects it
> >> probably is. For others it may just be an unnecessary obstacle, although
> >> I don't think it'd actually be *un*healthy for any project, assuming a
> >> big enough and diverse enough team (which should be a goal for the whole
> >> community).
> > 
> > It feels like we would be saying that we don't trust 2 core reviewers
> > from the same company to put the project's goals or priorities over
> > their employer's.  And that doesn't feel like an assumption I would
> > want us to encourage through a tag meant to show the health of the
> > project.
> 
> Another way to look at it would be that the perception of a conflict of 
> interest can be just as damaging to a community as somebody actually 
> acting on a conflict of interest, and thus having clearly-defined rules 
> to manage conflicts of interest helps protect everybody (and especially 
> the people who could be perceived to have a conflict of interest but 
> aren't, in fact, acting on it).

That's a reasonable perspective. Thanks for expanding on your original
statement.

> Apparently enough people see it the way you described that this is 
> probably not something we want to actively spread to other projects at 
> the moment.

I am still curious to know which teams have the policy. If it is more
widespread than I realized, maybe it's reasonable to extend it and use
it as the basis for a health check after all.

> The appealing part of the idea to me was that we could stop pretending 
> that the results of our mindless script are objective - despite the fact 
> that both the subset of information to rely on and the limits in the 
> script were chosen by someone, in an essentially arbitrary way - and let 
> the decision rest on the expertise of those who are closest to the 
> project (and therefore have the most information), while aligning their 
> incentives with the needs of users so that they're not being asked to 
> keep their own score. I'm always on the lookout for opportunities to do 
> that, so I felt like I had to at least float it.
> 
> The alignment goes both ways though, and if we'd be creating an 
> incentive to extend the coverage of a policy that is already 
> controversial then this is not the way forward.
> 
> cheers,
> Zane.
>