Just to add a data point with respect to the employer/organization limit, in the astropy project we used to have a very similar clause in our governance document, but it was a little difficult to enforce because the concept of an employer can be a bit nebulous in some cases. For instance, if two people are carrying out development while funded by grants from the same entity (say NSF, NASA, or EU funding), would this constitute a conflict of interest? (they would be after all receiving money from the same organization). Similarly, what about developers working as consultants with a number of different clients? Would a consultant working for say 1% of their time on a project for a company count as being from the same organization as someone working at the company? What if they spent 80% of their time? (where does one draw the line?)
We ended up removing the clause from the governance document and instead rely on the fact that people should declare any potential conflict of interest during the elections, and let the community decide. To be clear I’m not saying PEP 772 needs to be changed and am not objecting to the PEP as-is, but just wanted to share our experience and point out that reality will often be more messy, and enforcing this rule will not always be trivial.
An alternative is to make sure that people are open about organizations/companies they receive money from during the election, to also disclose changes in that situation to the community, and to have a process for people flagging decisions by the packaging council which they believe have been tainted by financial influence. For instance, one could also imagine a situation where a majority of PC members come from say two companies that have agreed to push through a change against the will of the community. This would also not be acceptable even though there was not a majority from one company.