I'd be very interested in hearing from those who responded to 10 - Checks and balances, as part of the work I do with the EA Good Governance Project. We've focused entirely on formal governance of EA organisations (through Boards of Trustees/Directors) but I have been thinking recently about how our work might consider a model of governance that includes:
- Formal governance
- Providing oversight through constituted bodies with decision-making authority (like Boards of Trustees/Directors)
- Requiring regulatory compliance
- Community governance
- Setting norms/expectations
- Holding individuals and organisations to account
- Funder/Market governance
- Allocating resources (through cause prioritisation and assessing individual funding bids)
- Performance monitoring (by requiring quarterly reviews, making funding conditional etc)
Forgive me, it's a bit rough as I planned to post something in the next week or two. This seemed like a good opportunity to start discussion though! My sense (through speaking to founders, exec staff and board members of EA orgs over the past few months; seeing the results of this survey) is something like:
EA does 1b, 2a and 3a really well.
EA orgs often don't do 1a at all (not required when fiscally sponsored, or for certain types of entity), or that well (board members recruited from within closed networks, also no-one really does boards well).
People are worried about 2b (more so than I expected, but about as much as I am!).
3b is done less than in traditional non-profits - a high-trust culture and belief that 2a and 3a are enough means this kind of thing is less relied upon.
I worry that this is a recipe for not good things. I don't worry so much about power abuse (I also trust in 2a!) but do think a thoughtful/maturing community has some gaps to fill in how it/its orgs are governed.
I appreciate this survey and I found many of your questions to be charming probes. I would like to register that I object to the "is elitism good actually?" framing here. There is a very common way to define the term "elitism" that is just straightforwardly negative. Like, "elitism" implies classist, inegalitarian stuff that goes beyond just using it as an edgelord libertarian way of saying "meritocracy".
I think there is a lot of conceptual tension between EA as a literal mass movement and EA as an usually talent dense clique / professional network. Probably there is room in the world for both high skill professional networks and broad ethical movements, but y'know ...