Request for comments: MRL Conflict of Interest and Financial Disclosure Guidelines about research-lab

[moneromooo-monero]

3. from the second list is lovely. Thank you on behalf of those people who want to do the right thing and still keep their privacy.

[Mitchellpkt]

I agree with comments above. Great work.

Since we want wide adoption, we should make it as easy to use as possible. In other words, I think we should have a tl;dr template that anybody can take and tweek to put at the top of their articles or mention during podcasts.

I was going to do a template but accidentally made an example. Regardless

Disclosure: I have small financial stake in Monero || I contribute to the the Monero {research lab, workgroup, etc}, however I cannot speak on behalf of a decentralized ad hoc community || I also carry out some analyses for zcash privacy tools. || I received payment in monero for the COBOL-RPC-JSON bindings FFS || This disclosure is shared to provide you context regarding my perspective. I strive to communicate fairly, and in good faith.

Drop whatever parts don't apply to you.

Wording style is awful but i'm too tired to fix it tonight. Thoughts on general approach?

[b-g-goodell]

We are aware of (some of) the vast body of literature written on ethics and disclosing conflicts of interest in fields ranging from medicine to law. We have done our best to distill the essence of a large sample of these documents down into a compact-ish format.

However, those documents (our "inspiration") are typically binding and come equipped with a variety of consequences of they are not followed; failing to uphold the ethics of a bar association comes with the consequences of being de-barred, failing to uphold the ethics of a medical institution comes with the consequence of losing your license as a doctor, etc. As a headless, decentralized organization, we lack enforcement mechanisms like these.

Although we regard this as a feature of our community of contributors, rather than a bug, it becomes unclear how much of our inspiration needs to be included in our version, considering our inability to rigorously enforce these rules, and our general lack of governance. It's possible the above document is too verbose, and it's possible that something vital has been left out. Please make some comments about it so we can flesh this out more thoroughly.

[b-g-goodell]

@SarangNoether added that, but I want to make clear: all of the above should be completely consistent with the idea of maintaining our contributors' privacies! Disclosing conflicts should not occur in sufficient detail that it could harm anyone's desired level of (pseudo/a)nonymity. It should be sufficient to say "I have a conflict of interest because I have (insert vague reason here)," which is loads more transparent than current "industry standards."

[anonimal]

Great guide, really 👍

Would you consider adding a link to the VRP in the section Report vulnerabilities responsibly? https://github.com/monero-project/meta/blob/master/VULNERABILITY_RESPONSE_PROCESS.md

It also covers MRL, as does the bounty.