Welcome 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: Update from the EA Good Governance Project, published by Stephen Robcraft on September 2, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
TL;DR
We are interested in supporting and promoting good governance of EA organisations. Currently, we host a directory of candidates looking for board positions at high-impact nonprofits
Measuring the impact of this work is hard (and we could do better) but we've got good reason to believe this is worth maintaining and expanding on
If you haven't signed up for the directory, then you should!
If you're thinking about how you can improve the governance of your organisation and/or looking for board members then we would love to speak with you
About us
The Good Governance Project launched in
October 2022, with an objective of helping EA organisations create strong boards and governance processes. The project's initial focus was on setting up and maintaining a directory of candidates interested in governance roles within EA organisations, and connecting EA organisations to these candidates.
We first provided an update in
February 2023 and are now following up on this, to share some information about our work and impact so far, as well as our plans going forwards. Until this month, the project had been delivered by a volunteer team of Grayden Reece-Smith and Moritz Hagemann. From August 2024, the project is being led by Stephen Robcraft, who will spend ~1 day per week expanding on the project's core work (helping EA orgs to find and appoint trustees) and exploring other activities supporting good governance.
Our work so far
The Candidate Directory has been relatively unchanged since it launched almost two years ago. However, we have implemented a couple of recent updates that might interest new and existing users:
1. Candidates can now log in (via a unique link) and update their profile at any time (no more outdated profiles!)
2. Candidates who have taken The 10% Pledge will see a next to their profile!
We will continue to update the Directory to make it more useful for candidates and organisations, so if you'd like to offer feedback / suggest a change, please
get in touch or leave a comment below.
If you're interested in trusteeship and haven't yet signed up
please do so! We get regular requests from highly impactful organisations and would encourage anyone in the EA community to consider setting up a profile.
Measuring impact
While recognising that this is difficult, we are clear that there is more work to do here.
In future posts, we hope to communicate a Theory of Change for good governance; articulate how hiring contributes to this; and describe how we will measure the impact of our work.
For now, we can share the following:
People are signing up - there are 159 candidates with profiles listed
Profiles are (increasingly) up-to-date - 31% have been created or updated since the beginning of July
Organisations are interested in this work - 28 have been in touch to request candidate details so far
Candidates are in demand - 76% of all candidates have had their details requested, rising to 82% for those candidates who created their profile 3 or more months ago
Candidates are being placed - to our knowledge, at least 3 organisations have appointed Trustees identified via the Candidate Directory
Beyond the Candidate Directory
In addition to setting up and maintaining the Candidate Directory, we have
shared resources on good governance, supported some organisations to
run board assessment processes, and others to conduct hiring rounds for new trustees.
We are keen to explore further work in each of these areas and will share more information on how we intend to do this in subsequent posts. For the moment, if you're thinking about how your organisation might improve its governance, or are interested in talking about governance in general, then please...

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