A Shorthand For Disclosure: What Type Is This?

Years ago, on my first blog, I typed the various styles of email formats used by businesses. Type 1 was "firstnamelastname@company.com", type 2 was "lastnamefirstname@company.com", type 3 was "firstname_lastname@company.com", and so on. I came up with a long list, as I recall, but the purpose was to simplfy life, so an individual or company could simply say "we use type 6 email format," and that would be that. (Of course, this was before spam had become such a headache.)

Today, in the interests of simplifying my own life, I am creating another list of types, but in this case they are types or degrees of advisory relationship I have with various companies. As an advisory capitalist, I am developing a portfolio of companies with which I have various sorts of relationships, and I would like to streamline and memorialize my disclosures, at the same time.

• Type 0 - No advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 1 - No advisory relationship, financial interest.
• Type 2 - Informal advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 3 - Formal advisory relationship, no financial interest.
• Type 4 - Formal advisory relationship, financial interest.

Type 0 is the baseline case: no relationship or interest. Type 1 is the situation that might exist if I bought stock in a company. Types 2-4 represent the various flavors of advisory relationship that might represent some sort of conflict of interest that I -- or some other blogger -- might want to disclose in a post.

I intend to tag my disclosures in this way at Technorati, so anyone can look up all of my disclosures, or just my Type 4 disclosures, and find all the associated links. At least from this point forward.

tags: advisory+capital, disclosure, disclosure+types, advisory+capitalist

Comments

[Daniel]

Stowe, that can get messy pretty fast. E.g. You're missing informal advisory relationship with a financial interest. If you try to add another dimension, you'll double the number of types, which will be even more confusing and less likely to be remembered. Managers do that all the time and it makes us programmers crazy :)

Creative Commons handle the problem very well for licenses. For disclosure, you could take:

NA - No Advisory
IA - Informal Advisory
FA - Formal Advisory

with

NI - No financial Interest
FI - Financial Interest.

IA-NI or FA-FI sound odd, although easier to remember than Type 2 or 4.

[Webomatica]

The tag idea is interesting but I must say I prefer your disclosure page. Maybe for extra special help you could add a link to that page whenever you make a post related to a relationship listed.