Should EVF consider appointing new board members?

I haven't thought about it much but removing people from boards after a massive miscalculation seems reasonable.

Like our prior should be to replace at least Nick and Will right?

I wanted to thank you for sharing. I think it can be hard or scary to raise concerns or feedback to a board like this, and I appreciate it.

(I can only speak for EVF US:) 

Since the beginning of all this, we’ve been thinking through board composition questions. In particular, we’ve been discussing what’s needed on the US board and what changes should be made. We’ve also explicitly discussed conflicts of interest and how we should think about that for board composition. 
 

There are a variety of different issues raised in the post and comments, but I want to say something specifically about FTX-related conflicts. In the aftermath of the FTX collapse, EVF UK and EVF US commissioned an outside independent investigation by the law firm Mintz to examine the organizations’ relationship to FTX, Alameda Research, Sam Bankman-Fried, and related individuals. We’re waiting for the results of the investigation to make a determination about whether any board members should be removed for FTX-related reasons. We’re doing this to avoid making rushed decisions with incomplete information. Nick has been recused from all FTX-related decision-making at EVF US. (Nick and Will have also been recused from FTX-related decision-making at EVF UK side, though that’s an independent process that I’ll let an EVF UK board member comment on.)
 

We’re also actively working on getting new board members. We hope to be able to share new board members soon (though these things take time). We understand the community wants updates, and we’ll do our best to answer questions and provide further news as we can (though it may be slow and limited).

Removing Claire from the EVF Board because she approved the Wytham Abbey purchase seems tremendously silly to me. FTX is a serious scandal that impacted millions of people; EA projects buying conference venues or offices isn't.

Edward Kmett's take on that topic seems correct to me:

I look at the building, a building I give myself even odds never to step into, as actually a plausibly solid investment from the standpoint of the cost of running events. I say that as someone who is not paid to care on this front.

[... A]s someone who has had to organize many conferences in the past, and who watched the utilization of the CFAR space in Bodega Bay, and what Lightcone has been up to, this doesn't seem anywhere near as beyond the pale to me as it seems to to some. 

What do I mean by that? Well. Lightcone gets something like 75% utilization out of the Hubinger house as an event space today. It also spends a comparable amount of money on an annual basis on the office space they offer in Berkeley where we first met to the cost of a prime rate loan for this property, which happens to match up with the cost of a loan for the Rose Garden Inn, almost to a tee. Looking at the Rose Garden Inn, it is a hot mess in downtown Berkeley, run down, and will need $3.5m worth of repairs or so. When they finish they expect to get about twice the space for about the same operating capital as the WeWork space they have today, and they'd be able to shed the apartments they offer for folks visiting the area, etc. because it'd actually be zoned for people to lay their head down and sleep, so it's just better than their office space, and it's suitable as an event location.

The Abbey is about the same price point as Rose Garden, somewhat fewer rooms, comparable distance to the center of Oxford where there are a bunch of EA orgs running around, somewhat less rundown, they are outsourcing the repair rather than running it in house, but apples to apples it's pretty damn close. The optics are terrible, but try to find a building in or around Oxford that isn't 300+ years old and historical in some way. 

Folks say you could buy some big box concrete office, but if you did that you still wouldn't be able to sleep your attendees. So you'd be subsidizing the hotel industry. Rent out conference halls at hotels? Sure, but now your 40 person event costs $80k. Run 15 of them and you are damn near break even for the year for the "castle". Relocate the event out into the boonies so you can run a 40 person event for $40k? Now you need to get them there, and it costs $80k again.

When you rent a hotel's conference rooms you typically burn $80-$160/hour in a location like oxford or a populous center like SF or Berkeley. 3 of them is typical for breakouts. That eats up budget fast. But so much of the community building stuff happens in all those little conversations at night, over tea, while walking. It's not virtual events that get people to change their mind. It's those in person sessions where you get to hold someone's attention for 4-5 days at a time, to break them out of their ruts and give them a chance to imagine what could be, and to baste in a sense of community. So yeah, virtual events are way cheaper, but you only convince those who are already convinced, you tend to get surface thoughts, even though you may get them out of more people. I think they are useful, but as an AND not an OR.

The hotel is going to kick you out of your event space at 5pm, so you aren't getting your evenings and midnight chats. The virtual venue is going to be f'ing terrible to socialize, you get no feedback when someone turns off their mic and camera and checks out. You lose them and you don't know why.

There's something to be said for a venue you can customize to the needs of your organization, adding more breakout spaces, comfy backjacks for circling, or whatever else fits the vibe of the community you are trying to build, and not having to spend days setting it back up and tearing it back down between events.

Chiming in from the EV UK side of things: First, +1 to Nicole’s thanks :) 

As you and Nicole noted, Nick and Will have been recused from all FTX-related decision-making. And, Nicole mentioned the independent investigation we commissioned into that. 

Like the EV US board, the EV UK board is also looking into adding more board members (though I think we are slightly behind the US board), and plans to do so soon.  The board has been somewhat underwater with all the things happening (speaking for myself, it’s particularly difficult because a lot of these things affect my main job at Open Phil too, so there’s more urgent action needed on multiple fronts simultaneously). 

(The board was actually planning and hoping to add additional board members even before the fall of FTX, but unfortunately those initial plans had to be somewhat delayed while we’ve been trying to address the most time-sensitive and important issues, even though having more board capacity would indeed help in responding to issues that crop up; it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg dynamic we need to push through.)  

Hope this is helpful!

While it is common for funders to serve on boards, it is not necessarily best practice.

This phrasing is a bit weasely. Is the claim that it's bad for funders to serve on boards? That it is not best practice? If that's what you think, why do you think that?

(Given how much of EVF's budget comes from OP, them having representation on EVF's board seems reasonable to me.)

Probably yes, but on a different rationale than people are taking here. 

Being on the EVF UK board is likely to require a significantly larger time commitment for the next few years, and is going to require a skill set that most of the current board wasn't selected for. I base that mainly on the existence of the statutory inquiry -- I think it is likely that EVF UK will end up with an action plan from the Charity Commission (at a minimum) that will require a lot more board involvement in the next few years. And, as far as I can tell, the board wasn't optimized for experience or aptitude in corporate governance and administration. Even after the statutory inquiry closes, I assume EVF UK will remain on the CC's radar for several years, and the board will need to make higher-than-baseline efforts to mitigate the risk of future CC involvement during that time.

Given that, and given the view that EVF exists to provide operations efficiencies rather than to micromanage the projects, it doesn't seem that EVF board membership is the highest and best marginal use of certain board members' time. Furthermore, in light of the changes in what the board needs, it would be appropriate to re-evaluate whether the current board members are the most qualified people to do the type of work that will be quite prominent for the next few years.

Excessively focusing the discussion of who should be on EVF's board through the lens of certain members having been poor performers will make it harder for people to step down for other reasons, because stepping down will feel like a confession of poor performance.

I believe quite strongly that EVF should prioritize expanding its board, regardless of whether Will and Nick resign or are removed. ^[1] This belief (which predates the FTX situation) centers around three points.

1. The current board is too small and too busy to provide good oversight to EVF and its constituent parts. Including Will and Nick there are seven people tasked with providing oversight for 10 orgs/projects, plus EVF as a whole, in addition to their other responsibilities. I don’t know why anyone would expect that to go well. The need for good oversight is quite important: CEA, one of the biggest and most important projects, has chosen to rely quite heavily on board oversight rather than e.g. publishing internal program evaluations for public scrutiny. This might be a good model (FWIW I personally find it problematic), but it certainly a level of board attention that seems implausible in the current setup. 
2. CEA is responsible for executing certain tasks on behalf of the community, e.g. operating effectivealtruism.org, promoting community health, running “communications for all of EA, not CEA in particular”, etc. In the past, there have been significant problems in how CEA has conducted this work (e.g. inappropriately favoring cause areas preferred by CEA staff and poor management of effectivealtruism.org).  Having (at least) one board member who is responsible for keeping CEA (and other parts of EVF) accountable to the community seems like positive step, especially if the community had input on the selection. Right now, Claire Zabel is the board remember responsible for ensuring CEA follows through on its commitments to the community. But I assume she’s also representing OpenPhil’s interests, which could certainly conflict with the community’s. A dedicated community representative wouldn’t have that problem.
3. Best practices for nonprofit boards would encourage adding some new blood. Term limits are common for nonprofit boards (nearly 90% have them), and several EVF board members have served in that role for much longer than normal. It is also frowned upon to have paid staff on the board. This means the US board, where Nicole is one of just three board members (with Nick recusing himself on some important issues), could especially benefit from new (non-staff) members.

1. ^{^}

   I largely agree with Peter in that to the extent they are already on a de facto on a leave of absence, “not making this leave of absence official I think is just getting all the costs of declaring a leave of absence without any of the benefits.”

All listed are, to my knowledge, reputable and generally ethical individuals.

Agree with this!

However, these connections represent a larger intermingling in EA that is concerning and representative of a culture rife with conflicts of interest.

Regardless of what we think the answer to the post's question is, I strong agree with this, and think much more needs to be done by the trustees to make transparent their possible conflicts of interest from being involved with multiple related organisations.

I also continue to believe that there being so few people running so many disparate threads of the EA movement is going to lead to overconcentration of influence, conflicts of interest, and reduced competition in the space regardless of who the individuals are, and that some or all of EV's subsidiaries should split off (in particular, there should be no formal connection between organisations serving the EA community and those running potentially controversial special ops like purchasing Wytham Abbey, incubating Alameda, etc).

To the poster, did you use BurnerAcct because of fear of reprisals professionally or personally due to being seen as questioning the authority/legitimacy/effectiveness of the current board?