[ncdnhc-discuss] Membership Status of Silicon Valley Public Access Link

[George Sadowsky]

All,

This issue of conflict of interest comes up in many different 
situations.  It's consuming a lot of time on this list.

When I was on the CREN Board in the mid-90s, Ira Fuchs made the 
comment that one of the reasons we happened to be on the CREN board 
was probably that we DID HAVE conflicts of interest.  What he meant 
was that networking was then a small community, and each of us were 
involved in multiple activities where there could conceivably be 
conflicts of interest between roles.

The community is now larger and more diverse, but the same situation 
applies.  Those of us who are actively involved in various aspects of 
networking are generally involved in more than one way.  In addition, 
most of us have one or more jobs which implicitly represent 
additional specific interests.

At CREN, each year we started our Board meeting with a verbal 
disclosure of all other activities which could possibly conflict with 
our role as CREN Directors, and we were careful to recuse (remove) 
ourselves on an individual basis whenever an issue involving a 
potential conflict came up.

This worked well, in part because we often met in person, we all came 
from the same culture (United States), and there was a high level of 
trust among Board members.

The fundamental principle here is that the best way to avoid conflict 
of roles is to declare conflicts, up front, and generate an 
environment of mutual trust that accepts individuals' 
self-assessments of when conflicts exist.

Is that something this group could work toward?

George