I agree this would be a big challenge. A few thoughts…
An independent investigation would probably make some people more likely to share what they know. It could credibly offer them anonymity while still granting proper weight to their specific situation and access to information(unlike posting something via a burner account, which would be anonymous but less credible). I imagine contributing to a formal investigation would feel more comfortable to a lot of people than weighing in on forum discussions like this one.
People might be incentivized to participate out of a desire not to have the investigation publicly report “person X declined to participate”. I don’t think publicly reporting that would be appropriate in all cases where someone declined to participate, but I would support that in cases where the investigation had strong reasons to believe the lack of participation stemmed from someone wanting to obscure their own problematic behavior. (I don’t claim to know exactly where to draw the line for this sort of thing).
To encourage participation, I think it would be good to have CEA play a role in facilitating and/or endorsing (though maybe not conducting) the investigation. While this would compromise its independence to some degree, that would probably be worth it to provide a sort of “official stamp of approval”. That said, I would still hope other steps would be taken to help mitigate that compromise of independence.
As others have noted, some people would likely view participation as the right thing to do.
I agree this would be a big challenge. A few thoughts…
An independent investigation would probably make some people more likely to share what they know. It could credibly offer them anonymity while still granting proper weight to their specific situation and access to information(unlike posting something via a burner account, which would be anonymous but less credible). I imagine contributing to a formal investigation would feel more comfortable to a lot of people than weighing in on forum discussions like this one.
People might be incentivized to participate out of a desire not to have the investigation publicly report “person X declined to participate”. I don’t think publicly reporting that would be appropriate in all cases where someone declined to participate, but I would support that in cases where the investigation had strong reasons to believe the lack of participation stemmed from someone wanting to obscure their own problematic behavior. (I don’t claim to know exactly where to draw the line for this sort of thing).
To encourage participation, I think it would be good to have CEA play a role in facilitating and/or endorsing (though maybe not conducting) the investigation. While this would compromise its independence to some degree, that would probably be worth it to provide a sort of “official stamp of approval”. That said, I would still hope other steps would be taken to help mitigate that compromise of independence.
As others have noted, some people would likely view participation as the right thing to do.