Disclosures

First off, Kelman, widely seen as the architect of procurement reform, is also a . I would be interested in what people think of this passage in particular. I have known Kelman for years and he has been pretty consistent in his positions over the years. And, agree or disagree with Kelman, he has been focused on improving government.But those graphs in the WP spurred this e-mail.My initial take was that this is over the top -- do we need to list every organization that somebody has worked for or with each time they do a piece? And Kelman has been very careful in highlighting such instances when there is even the possibility of a conflict. In fact, in a , we wrongly edited out that disclosure and sought to make an attempt to , which is never as effective as not making the mistake in the first place. That, however, was our error, not his.Kelman did write , but it was not about the procurement methods. Instead, he was highlighting the changes in how vendors see government contracts and performance. In the case of the US-VISIT contracts, vendors were leasing space and hiring people so they would be should they win the contract. In fact, that column doesn't mention Accenture and puts Lockheed Martin in pretty good light.The goal with disclosures is to ensure that readers know where a person is coming from. Our comment pages regularly have contributed pieces from vendors. These are not product pieces, although undoubtedly they do involve people urging some kind of technology. In , for example, we have a of FileNet talking about the importance of records and the impending flood of electronic records. Cull's company, FileNet, makes products that can help agencies deal with e-records. Our goal is to have these pieces focus on the larger topic -- to extract their expertise -- without having them be pieces about how wonderful their products are. We get those and we redirect them to our sales people where they can buy an advertisement.Back to Kelman. To be honest, I'm left in something of a quandry. I don't want to get into a position where everybody has to fill out a disclosure form to have an opinion and express it.However, does it hurt to add a line saying that he is also a consultant.My goal is to ensure that people do not feel misled.I'm not sure what we'll do yet. But feel free to comment... or .