This is a terrific post, thank you! And it’s generated some excellent discussion too. I particularly agree with Ivy’s thoughts about the effects of focusing on recruiting young people (I’ve discussed some similar things here and here) and Tobyj’s comment about how “more work needs to be done on governance at the ecosystem level” vs. the level of specific organizations.
In my opinion, the case for increased attention to governance is even stronger because your list of examples omits some of the community’s largest historical and ongoing instances of weak/unprioritized governance:
The board of Effective Ventures currently has an oversight mandate that seems on its face to be completely unrealistic. This five person board is responsible for overseeing CEA, 80k, Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, GWWC, Centre for the Governance of AI, Longview Philanthropy, Asterisk, Non-Trivial, and BlueDot Impact. I’m not sure what is meant by “The Board is responsible for overall management and oversight of the charity, and where appropriate it delegates some of its functions to sub-committees and directors within the charity”; it sounds like some of the organizations that make up EV might be responsible for their own oversight (which would raise other governance questions).
Effective Ventures has not communicated its thinking with respect to cause prioritization (though perhaps tellingly all five EV board members appear to hold a longtermist world view) and how (if at all) that thinking affects which organizations are allowed to operate under the EV umbrella. EV also hasn’t communicated anything about whether/how EV is accountable to the broader EA community in any way.
Community-level governance institutions are limited, and arguably non-existent. CEA’s community health team could possibly fit this bill, but it seems important that (as far as I know) there are no mechanisms in place to make that team accountable to the broader community or to independently assess instances where CEA itself (or individuals closely affiliated with CEA) could be causing a community health problem.
In my detailed Red Teaming analysis of CEA’s community building work, I found that (particularly prior to 2019) CEA routinely underdelivered on commitments, rarely performed meaningful project evaluations, and understated the frequency, degree, and duration of mistakes when publicly discussing them, often leading to negative externalities borne by the broader community. Some of the problems, such as favoring CEA’s cause priorities over the community’s in contexts like EA Global, effectivealtruism.org, and the EA Handbook, directly relate to community governance issues. (One of my conclusions from this analysis was “the EA community should seriously engage with governance questions.”)
When GiveWell changed the composition of its board in early 2019 three board members resigned, two of whom publicly described concerns they had with the board’s composition and role.
Brigid Slipka: “I am unsettled by the decision to reduce the Board down to a hand-picked group of five, two of whom are the co-founders and another of whom is the primary funder (in addition to also funding Holden at Open Philanthropy). This feels regressive. It represents a tightening of control at a moment when the focus should be on increased accountability to the public GiveWell serves.”
Rob Reich: “I have continuing concerns that the board’s important governance role is not taken seriously enough by GiveWell leadership. Board meetings are too frequently nothing more than the performance of meeting legal obligations. For an organization as large and as important as GiveWell, the oversight of GiveWell operations should be much greater, and welcomed by GiveWell leadership as an opportunity for diversifying input on GiveWell strategy. Recent decisions by GiveWell to shrink board membership are in my view a mistake, making it less likely that the board will play any serious role in steering the organization into the future.”
OpenPhil has a small board populated almost entirely by insiders who have been part of the organization since its founding. “The Open Philanthropy 501(c)(3) is governed by a Board of Directors currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz (Chair), Cari Tuna, Divesh Makan, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger. Open Philanthropy LLC is governed by a Board of Managers currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger.”
CEA, both historically and currently, has deprioritized public program evaluations that would add accountability to community members and outside stakeholders. Instead, CEA has prioritized accountability to board members and major funders. Notably there is significant overlap between those constituencies, with three of CEA’s five board members being employed by either Open Phil or FTX Foundation (until the latter’s team resigned due to the scandal).
I think this is one of the most important comments I’ve seen on the forum since I joined.
For me personally, both it and your post on CEA have valuable information that I didn’t know prior to reading them.
I think tackling these problems (some of which have easy solutions, like making boards larger and more diverse and independent) should be one of the top things the EA community starts demanding from these orgs.
I’m gratified you find my contributions helpful Guy, thank you for the positive feedback.
I think tackling these problems (some of which have easy solutions, like making boards larger and more diverse and independent) should be one of the top things the EA community starts demanding from these orgs.
I’m somewhat skeptical that there are a lot of easy solutions here. “Making boards larger and more diverse and independent” would help in my view, but a lot depends on procedural factors (how new board members are selected, who has input into that process, what the board’s mandate is, etc) as well as cultural factors (how empowered the board feels, how much the organization engages with the board, whether stakeholders feel represented by the board, etc.) I’d argue that the advisory panel CEA created in 2017 is a good example of how simply adding more perspectives isn’t sufficient; the community had no input into the board’s composition or mission, and eventually the panel seems to have just petered out pretty quickly as CEA appears to have stopped consulting it.
In my opinion, one of the best easy starting points would be for EA organizations and individuals to investigate the EA Good Governance Project, which seems well positioned to improve governance of specific EA organizations.
The trickier, and probably more important, task is to improve community level governance. In this space, I’d argue the highest priority is starting to address the question of how governance should work at Effective Ventures . This is not an easy question, but it is a critical one due to a) the importance of EV’s work to EA; b) the implausibility (in my opinion) of EV’s current board providing good oversight to its wide-ranging projects; c) EV operating certain projects on behalf of the broader community (e.g. community health, EAG, effectivealtruism.org); and d) allegations that EA leaders including multiple EV board members were aware of SBF behaving unethically at Alameda in 2018, potentially misaligning the incentives of EV and the EA community.
Some of these factors certainly apply to other organizations. OpenPhil’s work is obviously critical to the EA community so (A) applies, and I suspect (B) does too. But OpenPhil hasn’t assumed responsibilities from the EA community so (C) doesn’t apply, which makes me somewhat sympathetic to the argument that it’s Dustin and Cari’s money and they can do whatever they want with it. So the combination of factors above is really why I think the broader governance discussion needs to start with EV.
However the EA community decides to pursue better governance, I hope it leverages existing expertise on the subject and avoids notions of “EA exceptionalism” (which I think is always problematic but particularly bad in a context like governance where EA has a poor track record). Brigid Slipka’s resignation letter from GiveWell’s board includes links to several resources, and includes a thoughtful framework of her own. I think that framework is useful for understanding EV’s governance; I’d characterize EV’s programs as in the “adolescent” stage progressing toward “mature”, while the board setup seems like it’s still at the “start-up” stage.
This is a terrific post, thank you! And it’s generated some excellent discussion too. I particularly agree with Ivy’s thoughts about the effects of focusing on recruiting young people (I’ve discussed some similar things here and here) and Tobyj’s comment about how “more work needs to be done on governance at the ecosystem level” vs. the level of specific organizations.
In my opinion, the case for increased attention to governance is even stronger because your list of examples omits some of the community’s largest historical and ongoing instances of weak/unprioritized governance:
The board of Effective Ventures currently has an oversight mandate that seems on its face to be completely unrealistic. This five person board is responsible for overseeing CEA, 80k, Forethought Foundation, EA Funds, GWWC, Centre for the Governance of AI, Longview Philanthropy, Asterisk, Non-Trivial, and BlueDot Impact. I’m not sure what is meant by “The Board is responsible for overall management and oversight of the charity, and where appropriate it delegates some of its functions to sub-committees and directors within the charity”; it sounds like some of the organizations that make up EV might be responsible for their own oversight (which would raise other governance questions).
Effective Ventures has not communicated its thinking with respect to cause prioritization (though perhaps tellingly all five EV board members appear to hold a longtermist world view) and how (if at all) that thinking affects which organizations are allowed to operate under the EV umbrella. EV also hasn’t communicated anything about whether/how EV is accountable to the broader EA community in any way.
Community-level governance institutions are limited, and arguably non-existent. CEA’s community health team could possibly fit this bill, but it seems important that (as far as I know) there are no mechanisms in place to make that team accountable to the broader community or to independently assess instances where CEA itself (or individuals closely affiliated with CEA) could be causing a community health problem.
In my detailed Red Teaming analysis of CEA’s community building work, I found that (particularly prior to 2019) CEA routinely underdelivered on commitments, rarely performed meaningful project evaluations, and understated the frequency, degree, and duration of mistakes when publicly discussing them, often leading to negative externalities borne by the broader community. Some of the problems, such as favoring CEA’s cause priorities over the community’s in contexts like EA Global, effectivealtruism.org, and the EA Handbook, directly relate to community governance issues. (One of my conclusions from this analysis was “the EA community should seriously engage with governance questions.”)
When GiveWell changed the composition of its board in early 2019 three board members resigned, two of whom publicly described concerns they had with the board’s composition and role.
Brigid Slipka: “I am unsettled by the decision to reduce the Board down to a hand-picked group of five, two of whom are the co-founders and another of whom is the primary funder (in addition to also funding Holden at Open Philanthropy). This feels regressive. It represents a tightening of control at a moment when the focus should be on increased accountability to the public GiveWell serves.”
Rob Reich: “I have continuing concerns that the board’s important governance role is not taken seriously enough by GiveWell leadership. Board meetings are too frequently nothing more than the performance of meeting legal obligations. For an organization as large and as important as GiveWell, the oversight of GiveWell operations should be much greater, and welcomed by GiveWell leadership as an opportunity for diversifying input on GiveWell strategy. Recent decisions by GiveWell to shrink board membership are in my view a mistake, making it less likely that the board will play any serious role in steering the organization into the future.”
OpenPhil has a small board populated almost entirely by insiders who have been part of the organization since its founding. “The Open Philanthropy 501(c)(3) is governed by a Board of Directors currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz (Chair), Cari Tuna, Divesh Makan, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger. Open Philanthropy LLC is governed by a Board of Managers currently consisting of Dustin Moskovitz, Cari Tuna, Elie Hassenfeld, Holden Karnofsky, and Alexander Berger.”
CEA, both historically and currently, has deprioritized public program evaluations that would add accountability to community members and outside stakeholders. Instead, CEA has prioritized accountability to board members and major funders. Notably there is significant overlap between those constituencies, with three of CEA’s five board members being employed by either Open Phil or FTX Foundation (until the latter’s team resigned due to the scandal).
I think this is one of the most important comments I’ve seen on the forum since I joined.
For me personally, both it and your post on CEA have valuable information that I didn’t know prior to reading them.
I think tackling these problems (some of which have easy solutions, like making boards larger and more diverse and independent) should be one of the top things the EA community starts demanding from these orgs.
I’m gratified you find my contributions helpful Guy, thank you for the positive feedback.
I’m somewhat skeptical that there are a lot of easy solutions here. “Making boards larger and more diverse and independent” would help in my view, but a lot depends on procedural factors (how new board members are selected, who has input into that process, what the board’s mandate is, etc) as well as cultural factors (how empowered the board feels, how much the organization engages with the board, whether stakeholders feel represented by the board, etc.) I’d argue that the advisory panel CEA created in 2017 is a good example of how simply adding more perspectives isn’t sufficient; the community had no input into the board’s composition or mission, and eventually the panel seems to have just petered out pretty quickly as CEA appears to have stopped consulting it.
In my opinion, one of the best easy starting points would be for EA organizations and individuals to investigate the EA Good Governance Project, which seems well positioned to improve governance of specific EA organizations.
The trickier, and probably more important, task is to improve community level governance. In this space, I’d argue the highest priority is starting to address the question of how governance should work at Effective Ventures . This is not an easy question, but it is a critical one due to a) the importance of EV’s work to EA; b) the implausibility (in my opinion) of EV’s current board providing good oversight to its wide-ranging projects; c) EV operating certain projects on behalf of the broader community (e.g. community health, EAG, effectivealtruism.org); and d) allegations that EA leaders including multiple EV board members were aware of SBF behaving unethically at Alameda in 2018, potentially misaligning the incentives of EV and the EA community.
Some of these factors certainly apply to other organizations. OpenPhil’s work is obviously critical to the EA community so (A) applies, and I suspect (B) does too. But OpenPhil hasn’t assumed responsibilities from the EA community so (C) doesn’t apply, which makes me somewhat sympathetic to the argument that it’s Dustin and Cari’s money and they can do whatever they want with it. So the combination of factors above is really why I think the broader governance discussion needs to start with EV.
However the EA community decides to pursue better governance, I hope it leverages existing expertise on the subject and avoids notions of “EA exceptionalism” (which I think is always problematic but particularly bad in a context like governance where EA has a poor track record). Brigid Slipka’s resignation letter from GiveWell’s board includes links to several resources, and includes a thoughtful framework of her own. I think that framework is useful for understanding EV’s governance; I’d characterize EV’s programs as in the “adolescent” stage progressing toward “mature”, while the board setup seems like it’s still at the “start-up” stage.