A work-in-progress version of the CoI Policy

Dear Community,

over the past months, the Membership Committee (MC) and the Board of Directors (BoD) have been working on a Conflict of Interest Policy. It gives guidance and helps current and future BoD and MC members to take decisions.

When in 2010 our foundation was created, it was tailored to the specific needs of our diverse community - an independent FOSS project where the community and the ecosystem closely work together. With this policy, all volunteers, all corporate citizens and in general all stakeholders can be sure that their contributions have equal positive impacts.

Version 1.1 of the Conflict of Interest Policy has been approved and it was about time to publish it. We are all strongly committed to work on improved iterations, and so we already have a subsequent work-in-progress version 1.3.0, which is linked to this e-mail [1]. It will be further enhanced with the contributions of all interested parties, to seek for an even broader consensus.

Some notable points:
1. The policy guides to act in the best interest and to the full advantage of our Foundation.
2. It makes it easier for TDF to invest even further in a stable and sustainable ecosystem and to stimulate many more third parties to do so.
3. It is intended for future decisions, so it is not retroactive.

I'd like to thank everyone for the commitment to the topic so far, and looking forward for more feedback about it.

Cheers,

[1]: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/images/6/6f/BoD_Conflict_of_Interest_Policy_ver1_3_0.pdf