Comments
Thanks for sharing this; I especially appreciate the transparency that she resigned because of strategic disagreements.
I realize I am quite repetitive about this, but I really think EV/CEA would benefit from being more transparent with the community, especially about simple issues like 'who is currently in charge'. In this case I noticed the change on the website 18 days ago, and the actual handover may(?) have taken place prior to that point. My impression is that most normal organizations with public stakeholders announce leadership changes more or less immediately and I don't understand why EV doesn't.
Can you say more about your plans to bring additional trustees on the boards?
I note that, at present, all of EV (USA)'s board are current or former members of Open Philanthropy: Nick Beckstead, Zachary Robinson and Nicole Ross are former staff, Eli Rose is a current staffmember. This seems far from ideal; I'd like the board to be more diverse and representative of the wider EA community. As it stands, this seems like a conflict of interest nightmare. Did you discuss why this might be a problem? Why did you conclude it wasn't?
Others may disagree, but in my perspective, EV/CEA's role is to act as a central hub for the effective altruism community, and balance the interests of different stakeholders. It's difficult to see how it could do that effectively if all of its board were or are members of the largest donor.
I’d also like to see “the board be more diverse and representative of the wider EA community.” In addition to adding more members without ties to OpenPhil, I’d favor more diversity in the cause preferences of board members. Many of the members of the EV US and EV UK board have clear preferences for longtermism, while none are clearly neartermist. The same can said of the projects EV runs. This raises the question of whether EV sees its role as “a central hub for the effective altruism community, [balancing] the interests of different stakeholders” or if EV is instead trying to steer the community in specific directions. I hope EV offers more transparency around this going forward.
Hopefully, EV will be expanding its boards, which would be an opportunity to address these issues. Expanding the US board seems particularly important, since two of the four board members (Zach and Nicole) are staff members of EV (a pretty unusual structure) and as such would need to recuse themselves from some votes. This dynamic, combined with Nick (in the US and UK) and Will (in the UK) recusing themselves from FTX related issues, means the effective board sizes will be quite small for some important decisions.
Also: When CEA (now Effective Ventures) appointed an Executive Director in 2019, they wrote in their blog that the CEO of OpenPhil (at the time) "provided extensive advice" to the search committee and "contributed to the final recommendation to the board of trustees".