If I'm interviewing someone for a position my job is to assess their
suitability as a potential employee, but if they're my cousin I might
be tempted to give them an overly favorable review. Most
organizations have Conflict of Interest (CoI) policies that describe
how to handle this sort of situation: it's common that someone might
have external relationships which lead to duties, interests, or
desires that conflict with what's best for their organization.
It's reasonably common for non-profits to publish their CoI policies (Hewlett,
Carnegie, Gates). Within effective altruism I do see some of this:
Historically people
and organizations
within the EA movement have prioritized transparency, and while
there's been some
shift away from the most enthusiastic versions of this as we've better
understood the costs, there are still a lot of benefits. If
you're already going to the effort of drafting a policy like this,
making it public seems pretty useful:
EAs who are concerned about CoIs within the community and are
thinking about what norms they might try to influence can see what's
already formally in place.
Other organizations can reference it in trying to figure out
what sort of policy they want.
People who are worried a situation can see what policy was
(supposed to have been) followed.
On the other hand, many EA organizations don't seem to have public
policies. This includes ones that work in community building or
grant-making where they seem pretty important. Here are a few I
checked:
I'll write asking for policies, and will update this post if I hear
anything back.
Disclosure: my wife is a
GiveWell board member, former president of GWWC, and works for CEA
which is part of EVF. I haven't run this post by her and I don't know
her views here. I work at an organization that has received funding
from Open Philanthropy.
Comment via: facebook
Thank you Jeff for the post. I’m Alex, Director of Operations at Charity Entrepreneurship. We have a COI policy in our staff handbook, but you're right to say that our COI policy isn't public at the moment, so thank you for the nudge. Recent events made us think that we could take this opportunity to review our policy and potentially strengthen it even more, particularly by comparing it to others’ policies in this post. We will take a look and can commit to publishing it on our website before the end of the month.
Hi there!
Has Charity Entrepreneurship published its CoI policy? (I didn't find it on CE's website.)
Hi there. As promised, here is CE's Conflicts of Interest policy. We're still waiting for a couple of pieces of advice to come through so the text will likely change and we'll post an updated version. In saying that, there likely won't be wholesale changes.
I'm curious what "does not permit" means here, since below this is written fairly modest steps.
I.e. I am aware Joey (executive director) has dated several members of staff (and still does at point of writing). Do I understand correctly Joey was not permitted to do so, but since presumably he has followed the steps described in the COI, he is permitted to continue?
To be clear, I am new to COI's so this might be normal, plus I can see COI are not designed as a guide for good workspace culture, but to specifically mitigate a certain form of mismanagement (i.e. what would colloquially be called "corruption").
Somewhat related question, do you expect any individual board members have COI in that all are previous founders of CE incubated charities. I am not sure I can point to any direct harms from this, but it does pattern match onto a Revolving Door. The Effective Altruism space is large, so it does seem suboptimal to have only board members that were previously in a subordinate role to the directors of CE.
Probably not all of my thoughts here are related to COI, but more towards unhealthy culture around CE and the way it operates.
Hi Ofer, apologies for the delay. We're doing one final round of review and will be publishing it very soon. I will send you a link as soon as it's published.