I’ve been thinking a bit about this lately. It looks like a can of worms that needs to be open at some point.
My biggest concerns are contributing, information availability and ownership.
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Contributing: If a contributor does a great job setting up the Notion pages for a WG (it could be impression mining, design, whatever), he could go to the next DAO and get rewarded to do the same. What happens if he just copy/pastes our whole setup in which many people contributed? What happens if he does that in a competing DAO? What happens if we consider the Notion setup a competitive advantage? I believe that more and more DAOs will do this kind of horizontal work across other DAOs, how do we avoid conflicts then? What if they are private companies instead of DAOs? This is a just simple case and there are many levels of conflict that can occur with many nuances.
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Information: Our calls are open to everyone and a lot of information is public. This is really helpful to enable contributors to understand context and go make the most impact. But it is also available for competing products and other organization/people that have conflicting interests. I’m not sure how to measure the risk of this and whether we should do something about it (tiering access rights?), but any restriction would probably hurt the information flow to the people that should get it. In case we restrict it, this could be a different policy on information management across Index and contributors could opt-out of access to information if they think there is a conflict (while potentially contributing to other areas where there is no conflict).
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Ownership: Owning tokens that may present a conflict of interest. This sounds simple but I have a lot of doubts on what should be ok or not. @overanalyser mentioned in his disclosure that he has some $DOUGH, you could argue it’s a competitor but one could also argue that it is fairly different even if it is in the same category. I believe that quantities might also be important: if “some DOUGH” is, say, 1M or if it’s twice the amount of INDEX he holds… that might be a problem. This brings me to the next point
Finally, how do we check all this? Disclosing ownership of tokens, contribution to other DAOS… It’s a lot to ask. I wouldn’t like to have people create another profile to go anonymous just because they are not comfortable with the disclosures. Likewise I wouldn’t like contributors that prefer to be anonymous disclose an uncomfortable amount of information to comply with this. So I guess the only choice here is to do it through honor code.
I wish I could offer more answers instead of more questions here. This is a complicated topic and we are probably pioneering the discussion at this scale but I agree, we need a conflict of interest policy. I think it needs to start very simple (maybe as a loose framework) and develop over time.