Over the next few months we plan to send out more surveys to community members about what they like/dislike about the EA community members, and as mentioned above, we’re thinking about using community member satisfaction as a major metric for CEA. If it did become a key metric, it’s likely that we would share some of that feedback publicly.
We don’t currently have plans for a democratic structure, but we’ve talked about introducing some democratic elements (though we probably won’t do that this year).
Whilst I agree that consultation is vital, I think the benefits of democracy over consultation are unclear. For instance, voters are likely to have spent less time engaging with arguments for different positions and there is a risk of factionalism. Also the increased number of stakeholders means that the space of feasible options is reduced because there are few options that a wide spread of the community could agree on, which makes it harder to pursue more ambitious plans.
I think you’re right that this would increase community support for CEA’s work and make CEA more accountable. I haven’t thought a lot about the options here, and it may be that there are some mechanisms which avoid the downsides. I’d be interested in suggestions.
Anyway, I definitely think it’s important for CEA to listen to the community and be transparent about our work, and I hope to do more of that in the future.
I think there’s a lot of open space in between sending out surveys and giving people binding voting power. I’m not a fan of asking people to vote on things they don’t know about. However, I have something in mind of “inviting people to contribute in a public conversation and decision-making process”. Final decision power would still be with CEA, but input is more than one-off, the decision-making is more transparant, and a wider range of stakeholders is involved. Obviously, this does not work for all types of decisions—some are too sensitive to discuss publicly. Then again, it may be tempting to classify many decisions as “too sensitive”. Well, organisation “opening up” should be an incremental process, and I would definitely recommend to experiment with more democratic procedures.
I agree that it’s important that CEA reliably and verifiably listens to the community.
I think that we have been listening, and we published some of that consultation—for instance in this post and in the appendix to our 2019 review (see for instance the EA Global section).
Over the next few months we plan to send out more surveys to community members about what they like/dislike about the EA community members, and as mentioned above, we’re thinking about using community member satisfaction as a major metric for CEA. If it did become a key metric, it’s likely that we would share some of that feedback publicly.
We don’t currently have plans for a democratic structure, but we’ve talked about introducing some democratic elements (though we probably won’t do that this year).
Whilst I agree that consultation is vital, I think the benefits of democracy over consultation are unclear. For instance, voters are likely to have spent less time engaging with arguments for different positions and there is a risk of factionalism. Also the increased number of stakeholders means that the space of feasible options is reduced because there are few options that a wide spread of the community could agree on, which makes it harder to pursue more ambitious plans.
I think you’re right that this would increase community support for CEA’s work and make CEA more accountable. I haven’t thought a lot about the options here, and it may be that there are some mechanisms which avoid the downsides. I’d be interested in suggestions.
Anyway, I definitely think it’s important for CEA to listen to the community and be transparent about our work, and I hope to do more of that in the future.
Thanks for the elaborate reply!
I think there’s a lot of open space in between sending out surveys and giving people binding voting power. I’m not a fan of asking people to vote on things they don’t know about. However, I have something in mind of “inviting people to contribute in a public conversation and decision-making process”. Final decision power would still be with CEA, but input is more than one-off, the decision-making is more transparant, and a wider range of stakeholders is involved. Obviously, this does not work for all types of decisions—some are too sensitive to discuss publicly. Then again, it may be tempting to classify many decisions as “too sensitive”. Well, organisation “opening up” should be an incremental process, and I would definitely recommend to experiment with more democratic procedures.