EA - Bad Omens in current EA Governance by ludwigbald

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Bad Omens in current EA Governance, published by ludwigbald on December 20, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Edit: Please do scroll down and read the comments by Giving What We Can staff, who added context and clarified errors that remain in this post.I originally wanted to write a comment to the forum post CEA Disambiguation, which contains further context, but I believe this warrants its own post.The Effective Ventures Foundation (formerly known as CEA) (I'll call them EVF) runs many projects, including 80.000 hours, Giving What We Can, Longview Philanthropy, EA Funds, and the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), which in turn seems to run this forum.It is very strange to learn that these organizations are not independent from each other, and the EVF board can exert influence over each of them. I believe this structure was set up so the EVF board has central control over EA strategy.I think this is very bad. EVF can not be trusted to unbiasedly serve the EA community as a whole, it misleads donors, and it exposes effective altruism to unnecessary risks of contagion.An example (misleading donors):As "Giving What We Can", EVF currently recommends donations to a number of funds that are run by EVF:Longview Philanthropy: Longtermism Fundseveral Funds run by Effective Altruism FundsThrough the "EA Funds Longterm Future Fund", EVF has repeatedly paid out grants to itself, for example in July 2021 it paid itself $177,000 for its project "Centre for the Governance of AI".Another example (biased advertising):On/, which serves as an introduction to EA, the EVF links to its own project 80000hours, but not to the competing Probably Good.In both examples, the obvious conflicts of interest are stated nowhere.What should we do?I have not thought hard about this, but I have come up with a few obvious-sounding ideas. Please leave your thoughts in the comments!This is what I think we should do:I think we should break up the EVF into independent projects, especially those that direct or receive funding. Until that happens, we should conceive of EVF as a single entity.We need to push for more transparency. EVF's "EA Funds"-branded funds publicly disclose their spending, which is commendable! EVF's "Longview Longtermism Fund" does not. Funds should definitely disclose their conflicts of interest.We should champion community-run organizations like EA Germany e.V. or the Czech EA Association, and let them step into their natural role of representing the community. GWWC members should demand control over their institution.We should continue the debate about EA's governance norms. In order to de-risk the community and to represent our values, we should establish democratic, transparent and fair governance on all levels, including local groups.We probably should rethink supporting community leaders that consolidate their power instead of distributing it.DFTBA,LudwigPS: the same consideration applies for effektiveraltruismus.de, which is run by an EA donation platform, and not by EA Germany.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.