EA - Overview: Reflection Projects on Community Reform by Joris P

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: Overview: Reflection Projects on Community Reform, published by Joris P on May 1, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.TL;DR: We’re sharing this short collection of active projects that we’re aware of, that focus on community reform and reflections on recent events.We don’t know much about the projects and are probably missing some projects (please let us know in the comments!), but we’ve found it hard to keep up with what is and is not happening, and noticed that we wished that a list like this existed.We’re posting this in our personal capacity. Any mistakes are our own. We did ask colleagues at CEA for input and feedback; thank you to Lizka & Chana (CEA), and Robert (not CEA) in particular!A lot has happened in the EA community over the past half year. In light of all the developments, people have discussed all kinds of changes EA could make.As community members, we’ve been finding it quite hard to follow what work is being done to reflect on the various ways in which we could reform. That's why we tried to put together a (incomplete!) list of (mostly ‘official’) projects that are being done to reflect on all sorts of questions that came up over the past six months.Some CaveatsThe topics listed below are not in any way a complete overview of the things that could or should be discussed - we don’t think we’re covering all the things community members are thinking about, and aren’t trying to!A topic isn’t “covered” or “taken” if there’s already a project that’s focused on it. Many of these projects are trying to cover a lot of ground, and the people working on them would probably appreciate other groups trying to do something on the topic, too.We chose to include mostly reflection projects that are being done in an official capacity, or by more than one person. That means we’re not including a lot of interesting Forum posts or news articles that have been written about possible problems and reforms! See the section 'Assorted written criticisms and reflections' below for some examples.This list is almost certainly incomplete. For instance, some projects we've heard about aren't public, and we think it's likely that there are other projects we haven't heard about. We encourage people to share what they’re working on in the comments!We’re not really sharing our views on how excited we are about the projects.The projects we’re aware ofThe EA survey (run by Rethink Priorities in collaboration with CEA) was updated and re-sent to people to ask about FTX community response — you can see the results hereCommunity health concernsInvestigations into the CEA Community Health Team’s processes and past actions:There’s an external investigation into how the CEA Community Health Team responded to concerns about Owen Cotton-Barratt (source)An internal review of the CEA Community Health Team’s processes is also ongoing (same source as above)Members of the Community Health team shared they hope that both investigations will be concluded sometime in the next month. They noted that the team does not have control over the timeline of the external investigationThe CEA Community Health Team is (separately) conducting “a project to get a better understanding of the experiences of women and gender minorities in the EA community” (source)Governance in EA institutionsJulia Wise and Ozzie Gooen are setting up a taskforce that will recommend potential governance reforms for various EA organizations. They are currently looking to get in touch with people with relevant expertise - see hereNote that they write: “This project doesn’t aim to be a retrospective on what happened with FTX, and won’t address all problems in EA, but we hope to make progress on some of them.”EA leadership & accountabilityAn investigation by the law firm Mintz, commissioned by EVF UK and EVF US, “to...