Related Members

[mnot]

The current process says this about related members:

In the interest of ensuring the integrity of the consensus process, Member involvement in some of the processes in this document is affected by related Member status. As used herein, two Members are related if:

• Either Member is a subsidiary of the other, or
• Both Members are subsidiaries of a common entity, or
• The Members have an employment contract or consulting contract that affects W3C participation. A subsidiary is an organization of which effective control and/or majority ownership rests with another, single organization.

Related Members must disclose these relationships according to the mechanisms described in the New Member Orientation [INTRO].

A couple of issues here:

1. Does having an employment contract or consulting contract include when one entity contracts another, or funds it in some alternative fashion (eg grants, awards)? The language here is a bit informal.
2. The disclosure tool should REALLY be a tool of some sort that makes it easy to discover the relationships between Members. As it is, you have to look at each e-mail to discover what Members are involved, unless they make it obvious in the Subject.
3. This should be mentioned in the anti-trust policy.
4. I think Members should be more regularly reminded of this; I strongly suspect that not all members are compliant with this policy (without naming names).

[dwsinger]

We'd like to transfer to the team to consider some sort of disclosure tool/system, such that looking up a member (or IE?) tells you their disclosures, and there's a disclosure.