Open Board recruitment should be a norm

I appreciate this post and agree with your points. Especially that of having some outside-EA board members. I am an academic and my research is EA-adjacent, but I have no ties to any EA org/cause area, which would reduce perceived conflicts of interest (which I have seen discussed on the forum). I also believe there is a lot that an EA org could learn (especially related to governance/transparency best practices) from a board member that has a lot of experience in traditional nonprofit work (especially at a large organization).

I would add that it would be very desirable for prominent EA organizations to also create junior boards (or just have a few designated junior board members). Junior boards have a lot of benefits:

1. Younger professionals may be able to invest more time than more senior/prominent professionals
2. It creates a pipeline of board talent in the EA community
3. There are a TON of early-career EAs who are passionate about advancing their career and a junior board is an excellent opportunity for them to do so

For me personally, I am a relatively-early career professional (not working at an EA org) who wants to give back to the community as a board member, but frankly I don't believe I quite have the experience to join a big-time board (for example, I applied for the EV open call, but really have 0 expectation that I qualify for a short list). The alternative is to find a smaller org to join, but that is also quite challenging.

Jack - or others who have run open board rounds recently - can you say more concretely what your advertisement and selection process was? In HLI, we're thinking about doing an open board round soon, but I'm not sure exactly how we'd do it.

For reference, for selection for staff, we standardly do an initial application, two interviews and two test tasks (1 about 2 hours, 1 about 5 hours). This doesn't seem like obviously the right process for board members: I'm hesitant to ask board members to do (long) test tasks, as they would be volunteers, plus I'm not sure what they would even be. But I'm also wary of spending lots of staff time on interviews and, similarly, don't have a very clear idea of what criteria I'm selecting against. So, any recommendations you have would be great!

Risks/objections/exemptions:

1. Bigger Boards are unwieldy - yes, they can be. This is really a question of Board process though. A good chairperson and CEO can keep meetings on track, prevent grandstanding etc.

2. Board members can interfere and slow things down - yes, bad Board members can, but you can manage this (especially with a competent chairperson). Imagine an employee told you that they won't accept having a manager, because managers can interfere and slow things down. I imagine the response would be 'yes, bad managers do that; but you don't get to opt out of management altogether because of that. If it happens, let us know and we'll address it.'

3. It takes time to assess potential Board members - yes, it does. I think our latest round has taken around 30 hours split between 4 people. Of course, it also takes time to hire staff. I guess a Board member would be seen as somewhere between 0.5x and 1.5x as important as a top hire depending on context, and you can adjust your hiring process accordingly.

4. Appointing Board members with an outside view will reduce value alignment - it depends. In our recent round, we used some short screening questions to assess value-alignment on the application form. We found that 22/27 applicants met our bar for 'would be a valuable, values-aligned Board member'. Only one of the applicants could be considered a 'core EA'.

5. All the best potential Board members are already core EAs/my mates/part of my organisation's universe - I assume you don't mean this.

6. One bad Board member can hijack organisations and make them ineffective - this seems very unlikely because they are only one of several and they would need to overcome other Board members, the CEO and the organisation's founding documents to do this. Theories about how people from outside EA will infiltrate Boards and change the organisation's mission tend to sound like conspiracy theories to me.

7. My org is only just starting, so can't I just appoint quickly from people I already trust? - yes, plausibly. This will come with significant downsides in terms of accountability, blindspots and diversity, but you might choose to prioritise speed and ease at the start. I would still probably recommend an open call to see who you get; and at the least have a plan for doing proper Board recruitment within 24 months.

In our latest round, we had more than 20 people who met our bar for 'would be a values-aligned, valuable Board member'. Also, some of them were so impressive that we wouldn't have approached them directly, believing that they would be unlikely to accept.

How many of these 20 people were people you already knew? I think for us at RP doing open board recruitment, the key thing was finding a bunch of people that we had no idea to ask and never would've invited.

At the risk of slightly turning the focus, I'd like to pitch for the importance of properly onboarding whoever is selected. Some of that onboarding is general in nature and could be more efficiently done at a community level -- for instance, learning about the legal responsibilities of trustees in the UK or board members in the US, learning how to evaluate an executive director, etc. Some of it is probably cause-area specific and could be semi-centralized; I imagine there is a body of information that directors of AI safety organizations need to know. And some of it is organization-specific.

I speculate that the onboarding needs of open-recruitment directors and "traditionally" found directors could be different on average. The former might need relatively more onboarding of the cause-area type, while the latter might need relatively more on good governance (and specific board skills less likely to be developed through object-level work) more generally.