One additional idea that we had might be for us to create some kind of small external board that can supervise our COI decisions, and that in some sense has authority to deal with difficult edge-cases. By default this would be CEA staff members, but it might make sense to invest some more resources into this, and have more clearly delineated responsibilities in this space, and to allow for broader community buy-in than I think would be the case if we were supervised just by CEA staff members.
Curious about whether anyone has experience with something like this, and whether it seems like a good idea.
Kudos for writing up a proposal here and asking for feedback publicly!
Companies and nonprofits obviously have boards for similar situations, these funds having similar boards that would function in similar ways would seem pretty reasonable to me. I imagine it may be tricky to find people both really good and really willing. Having a board kind of defers some amount of responsibility to them, and I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t be excited to gain this responsibility.
I guess one quick take would be that I think the current proposed COI policy seems quite lax, and I imagine potential respected board members may be kind of uncomfortable if they were expected to “make it respectable”. So I think a board may help, but wouldn’t expect it help that much, unless perhaps they did some thing much more dramatic, like work with the team to come up with much larger changes.
I would personally be more excited about methods of eventually having the necessary resources to be able to have a less lax policy without it being too costly; for instance, by taking actions to grow the resources dedicated to funding allocations. I realize this is a longer-term endeavor, though.
One additional idea that we had might be for us to create some kind of small external board that can supervise our COI decisions, and that in some sense has authority to deal with difficult edge-cases. By default this would be CEA staff members, but it might make sense to invest some more resources into this, and have more clearly delineated responsibilities in this space, and to allow for broader community buy-in than I think would be the case if we were supervised just by CEA staff members.
Curious about whether anyone has experience with something like this, and whether it seems like a good idea.
Kudos for writing up a proposal here and asking for feedback publicly!
Companies and nonprofits obviously have boards for similar situations, these funds having similar boards that would function in similar ways would seem pretty reasonable to me. I imagine it may be tricky to find people both really good and really willing. Having a board kind of defers some amount of responsibility to them, and I imagine a lot of people wouldn’t be excited to gain this responsibility.
I guess one quick take would be that I think the current proposed COI policy seems quite lax, and I imagine potential respected board members may be kind of uncomfortable if they were expected to “make it respectable”. So I think a board may help, but wouldn’t expect it help that much, unless perhaps they did some thing much more dramatic, like work with the team to come up with much larger changes.
I would personally be more excited about methods of eventually having the necessary resources to be able to have a less lax policy without it being too costly; for instance, by taking actions to grow the resources dedicated to funding allocations. I realize this is a longer-term endeavor, though.