"G. Branden Robinson" <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote on 07/02/2025 at 17:41:41+0100:
Biases are often unconscious, whereas conflicts of interest are always known to the person who has them.
Le Sat, Feb 08, 2025 at 12:55:38AM +0100, Pierre-Elliott BΘcue a Θcrit :
I don't think it's always clear to them.
At my workplace, we have "rules for conflicts of interest management",
and in of them aims at "preventing situations in which [the researchers]
may be perceived to have a conflict of interest".
So here we have three different scopes:
- conflict of interest is concious to individuals,
- conflict of interest can be unconcious to individuals,
- conflict of interest can be outside the control of individuals.
As we see in this discussion, there is a considerable disagreement
within Debian about the very definition of what a conflict of interest
is. I think that this makes us ill-equipped to to handle situations
where one developer expresses the opinion that another developer has a
conflict of interest.
We are not going to solve that overnight, but I feel that we need to
agree on the minimum, which is:
- it is not a taboo,
- it is not an attack,
- it is not a misconduct.
This is all that I have been aiming for when I started this discussion.
By the way, for the full disclosure, and also to counter the argument
that using ChatGPT to write a text in a language that I am not
comfortable with was an act of carelessness in which I dumped
low-quality text produced with no effort, here is the inputs I gave:
Prompt 1:
Please draft a very brief conflict of interest statement for a
non-profit organisation such as Debian, that has a very diverse
membership, and diverse understanding, acceptation and experience of the concept of conflict of interest. The main point to address is that
people have employers or sponsors which themelves can be donators, have interest, or be impacted by Debian's decisions. The policy should advise
on how to handle the information and when to refrain from participating
to a decision, and also how to raise the possibility of a conflict of
interest without offending the person, etc.
Not satisfied with the results, I added prompt 2:
Can it explain a bit more what a conflict of interest is, acknowledge
that opinions may differ on that point, and also say that there is
nothing bad at all of being in a situation of conflict of interest?
I was then satisfied that what I read was what I wanted to write, but
better written that if I would do it myself.
Some parts are not perfect, but if there is appetite we have a lot of
talented people here who can make it better.
We do not have to conclude soon. We can give the chance to everybody, including the vast majority of people who read but do not write on this
list, to think about it, take the time it needs to be exposed to
situations in their life where the question of "what is a conflict of
interest" has some relevance, before we try to progress further.
Have a nice week-end,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from home
https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
- You do not have my permission to use this email to train an AI -
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