Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Jacy Reese Anthis
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting started at 6:00pm CT.
The meeting was held via video call. Jacy was appointed as minute taker. Jacy was tasked with editing the minutes after the meeting. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
The board meeting closed at 6:47pm CT.
Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Jacy Reese Anthis
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting started at 10:27am ET over email.
The meeting was held via email. Jacy was appointed as minute taker. The full board was present, so the quorum was met.
The board meeting closed via email on 2022-06-02 at 3:25pm CT.
This meeting was conducted over email to vote on a bylaw change.
Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Max Daniel, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting started at 8:15 CT over email.
The meeting was held via email. Jacy was appointed as minute taker. The full board was present, so the quorum was met.
The board meeting closed via email on 2020-10-17 at 4:42pm CT.
Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Max Daniel, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting started at 4:00pm UTC.
The meeting was held via video call. Jacy was appointed as minute taker. Jacy was tasked with editing the minutes after the meeting. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Jacy provided an update on SI’s investment choices, especially the risk-return trade-off, and the board decided to continue its current strategy until at least the end of 2021.
The board meeting closed at 4:59pm UTC.
This meeting was conducted over email to discuss SI’s investment strategy.
Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Max Daniel, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting started at 9:15pm UTC over email.
The meeting was held via email. Jacy was retroactively appointed as minute taker. The full board was present, so the quorum was met.
The board meeting closed via email on 2020-11-12 at 1:37am UTC.
Board members present: Kelly Anthis, Max Daniel, Jorge Lugo, Jacy Reese Anthis
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Jacy Reese Anthis
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at 2pm UTC.
The meeting was held via video call. Jacy was appointed as minute taker. Jacy was tasked with editing the minutes after the meeting. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Went over board responsibilities outside of meetings, primarily just ad-hoc review of documents such as Quarterly Reports and IRS 990 forms.
Executive Director Performance Evaluations have been folded into annual reports
Jacy to explain: So far SI has focused on farmed animals as the priority area within more circle expansion (MCE). We could add artificial sentience as a priority area or switch to it, given its neglectedness and long-term importance, though it’s unclear if SI is well-positioned (e.g. donors, networks) to move into that area.
Max: What other focus areas are on the table?
Jacy: Wild animals, the global poor, future beings, macro-history (which contributes to the EA-minded research landscape, e.g. AI Impacts work on discontinuous technological progress).
Max: Who would be the target audience and what would we achieve in artificial sentience?
Jacy: Field-building, more similar to the wild animal research being done today than the farmed animal research.
Jorge: SI has built a network within farmed animal advocacy. We may lose that momentum by pivoting to a different cause area. Splitting between them could make use of that momentum.
Kelly: We can do both to an extent.
Jacy: We could keep doing ‘passive’ farmed animal work quite easily, e.g. advice, meetings, presentations. The ‘active’ work could be split anywhere along the spectrum in terms of staff time or number of reports.
Max: There does seem to be a neglected niche of artificial sentience work, and SI is small and dynamic so could fill this niche.
Jorge: Moving slowly and testing the waters here may be ideal.
General sense of SI strategy, e.g. when/if to make another researcher hire, what research should they specialize in.
Overall the board thinks it seems like we could/should make a hire in the fall to replace Jacy, and then potentially another hire based on December fundraising.
Jorge: Good to keep it open, have a bar where we may not end up making a hire, leaving the posting open longer.
Kelly: In first two hiring rounds, we discussed qualitative and quantitative areas researchers could specialize in. In third, we were looking for quantitative specifically. Now we could list multiple routes, quant, qual, farmed animals, artificial sentience. Revisit in June (so we can make a post in July if we want)
Jacy: Also, I am looking into investments for our financial assets.
Currently we have 4 board members. Requirement is 3.
Jacy via email: Current composition seems fine for now. Keeps us from having to do time-sensitive onboarding if someone needs to leave.
The board meeting closes at 4:12pm UTC.
Board members present: Kelly Witwicki, Max Daniel, Diana Fleischman
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Max Daniel
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at 2pm UTC.
The meeting was held via video call. Max was appointed as minute taker. Kelly was tasked with editing the minutes for publication after the meeting. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Kelly would like to leave the staff early in the new year to go back into tech. Diana and Max like the plan Kelly proposed over email, in which she would leave staff but stay on the board as President. Kelly’s current preference is to continue voluntarily managing the website but otherwise continue only as an advisor or serving on the board in a limited capacity. Options for a succession plan are either to hire a new ED or a part-time administrator to take on only essential admin duties. The latter option would make SI more of an academic structure, primarily coordinating highly-independent researchers, conducting less outreach than we have previously. Kelly thinks this structure is agile and suitable for the small and research-focused organization. The viability of the former option is unclear, and if we don’t find a suitable ED we’ll lose time and need to fall back on the latter plan anyways. The board tentatively favors hiring an administrator, but will revisit this decision in early January.
Diana would like to reduce the responsibilities on her plate, so her last day on the board will be December 31, 2019. Max and Kelly will discuss invitees, and if it takes longer than by Dec 31 to find someone Jacy can temporarily serve as the third required board member.
Kelly gave updates on new commitments by donors.
The board reviewed the report on the 3rd quarter of 2019. Max and Diana are happy with the staff’s productivity.
The board meeting closes at 2:39pm UTC.
Board members present: Diana Fleischman, Max Daniel, Kelly Witwicki
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Diana Flesichman
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at 2pm UTC+1.
The meeting was held via video call. Diana was appointed as minute taker. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Confidential
Now that SI is more established and growing, the board has acquired liability insurance and directors and officers insurance.
Kelly presented the Q2 report.
Messaging RCT study is on the back burner at the moment. Rethink is replicating the poll on attitudes against animal farming
The board meeting closes at 9:56 EDT.
Board members present: Diana Fleischman, Max Daniel, Kelly Witwicki
Meeting moderator (chair): Max Daniel
Minute taker: Diana Flesichman
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at 5pm GMT+1.
The meeting was held via video call. Diana was appointed as minute taker. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Max is very happy to be board chair. Kelly and Diana confirmed Max as board chair.
Confidential
Diana already spoke about most of this stuff with Kelly and Jonas previously. Change in that Kelly froze the hiring round this spring.
Max wanted to know more detail about the GM case study. Kelly said it was more valuable and got more positive feedback than previous tech study. GFI has shared that they read the reports for their strategic discussions. J still gets emails about the helpfulness of the report from actors in the cell-based food space.
Max wants to know if GFI has made any strategy updates because of the GM report. Kelly knows that they have considered the report but not whether they have made specific changes based on it.
Max wanted to know more information about the “3 Big Changes We Need in the Farmed Animal Movement” piece and how that has been received. Kelly says that it’s been useful for easily sharing information about SI’s views e.g. why the “go vegan” message isn’t optimal.
The last point for Max is that he likes the specific goals for going forward. Max noticed that some of the goals are very specific e.g. hire 2 more people whereas others are vaguer e.g. “use book to publish articles in mainstream media.” Kelly and Diana shared that it’s difficult to push to a specific number of op-eds with articles you have to pitch, considering whether the article is topical etc. Kelly discussed some of the other issues in consideration when exploring a new research area, the uncertainty about how long topics will take to research, how new information comes up and how new things become topical e.g. the DEI report that Kelly wrote.
Max and Diana think progress and goals are good.
The board meeting closes at 18:30 at GMT+1
Board members present: Diana Fleischman, Jonas Vollmer, Kelly Witwicki
Meeting moderator (chair): Jonas Vollmer
Minute taker: Diana Fleischman
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at 11am ET.
The meeting was held via video call. Diana Fleischman was appointed as minute taker. The full board is present, so the quorum is met.
Low income, but not concerning given typically uneven distributions of donations; no budget change; spent a lot on international speaking tours ahead of the book’s publication, earmarked; published some articles and podcasts.
Kelly assisted and advised a gender equity group in the animal rights community; continued advising advocates on strategy, careers, and research as usual; Jacy participating in monthly calls with other EAA research groups.
Hired Jamie.
In-progress research: Jamie’s exploration of the tractability of changing the course of history, informing what can we expect to learn from history and longtermism; J working on biofuels tech adoption case study; Jacy working on large-scale messaging RCT; Kelly working on review of research regarding strategies for equity and inclusion.
Mistakes: We probably should have waited on hiring Jamie as Jacy was too busy to give ample time to his onboarding, but it was fine.
Raised $134,000, some of which CEA is still processing.
Kelly discussed the budget, salaries, and the budget for getting representative samples from mTurk or other platforms.
Published book, and gave book talks in US. Two ways of measuring outreach, sales and quantity and quality of exposure: sales were low, unsurprisingly, but received substantial mainstream media exposure incl interview on TYT, Quillette articles, and The Guardian, which was especially good and can now serve as a resource on SI’s views of humane animal farming. MFA hosted a book giveaway which was good exposure for the book.
Kelly published DEI piece, which Diana reviewed. Kelly shared DEI piece’s positive reception.
Kelly called with THL staff about SI’s work.
J’s biofuel’s study has been recently edited by Jacy and that should be to external reviewers in the next few weeks.
Jamie’s health behavior lit review is done and Jacy will edit that soon.
Jacy now working on large-scale messaging RCT with two academics.
Kelly and Jacy have generally deprioritized how much time they think SI should be doing quantitative research, because of qualitative niche SI has developed in EAA ecosystem, pushing this to the 3rd full-time researcher hire (5th staff member) and deprioritizing Jacy working on quant research, though not deprioritizing entirely as shorter-term outlook of most EAA researchers leaves some quant projects neglected.
Kelly’s moral expansion literature review is on the backburner, not sure when it will move forward. Jamie is interested in doing a social movement case study, he’s currently considering which movement to focus on. J is thinking about shaping up the GM foods report into something that could be published in a journal. Kelly discussed some reflections on previous hiring decisions and staff contributions.
Mistakes: Jacy should have pursued a piece in the NYT more aggressively after they expressed interest. Also thinks he should have done more interview practice. Jamie’s history blog posts maybe should have been just one report. Jacy isn’t sure if he should have named the book differently or focused more on virality instead of intellectual rigor. We think that Jacy spent too much time on speaking before the book came out. Starting the messaging strategies RCT this year might have been too low priority. Kelly and Jacy should have been more in contact with donors over the past year. Kelly failed to thank one donor until about a year after their donation.
In the upcoming quarter SI is hiring a new quantitative researcher to run RCTs etc, hopefully will bring someone on board with social science research background in the next month or two.
Will get external review on J’s most recent report; previous reports did not due to time constraints. J and Jamie working on prioritization.
Jacy spoke at SF Alternative Protein Show.
Kelly spoke at NYC local EA meetup about antislavery study and other work.
Kelly will talk at New Food Conference in Berlin about psychological and social factors influencing animal-free food adoption. Kelly’s looking forward to talking with ACE’s new ED Leah Edgerton while she’s there.
Board reviewed annual mistakes for public page.
Kelly wants to formalize SI’s impact assessment and keep record of metrics. Shared document with some metrics recalled to date, broken down by insights, movement influence, and public outreach. Jonas suggested a way to measure relative value of research projects. We discussed considering impact relatively, and absolutely.
Jonas discussed the performance review of the executive director. This was originally written in the bylaws but could be simplified. Jonas has in mind a document detailing some high level decisions and how they were reached as the most important aspects to include in the evaluation and apart from that the rest we might get from quarterly reports. Kelly says she is happy to adapt the quarterly reports into an annual executive report that has the relevant details. Jonas will edit the criteria in the SI performance report as to what he thinks is missing from the quarterly report and we will all sign off on it, then Kelly will prepare the report and the board will review.
Jonas is considering stepping down from the board due to time constraints. We discussed consulting with new people to invite to the board. Three people must be on the board at all times. Diana discussed how she might have to step down in several months time too. Kelly will draft list of candidates.
The board meeting closes at 12:10pm ET.
Board members present: Diana Fleischman, Jonas Vollmer, Kelly Witwicki
Minute taker: Diana Fleischman
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at noon ET.
Diana Fleischman was decided as the minute taker. We didn’t have a formal agenda but we did go through the quarterly report.
Funding and budget: Kelly said SI has completed a whole year and has runway until March 2019. In estimating the runway Kelly excludes unusual grants. Kelly says she is comfortable budgeting a little over 250K a year. Including money CEA is holding SI has roughly 170K in the bank. Kelly said SI now has the funding to make salaries commensurate with other organizations’ entry-level salaries. SI is more funding constrained than talent constrained so it’s okay for now to offer entry level salaries. Jonas discussed with Kelly estimating funding runway including how much diversity of funding an org needs and how much runway to optimally have. Kelly said SI is increasing the amount to spend on Jacy’s speaking tour by about 5K.
Salaries: Jonas said other EA orgs regret not raising salaries earlier. Kelly intends SI to be very egalitarian salary-wise with herself and Jacy making no more than high-level research staff. Also, Kelly is skeptical about a policy of paying everyone what they ask for because men tend to ask for more money than women. One way of addressing the salary issue is asking “how secure do you feel with your finances at the moment?” and raising people’s salaries due to their response to that question, rather than because they asked for more money. Kelly thought that might be a good way to go about calibrating salaries.
Accomplishments: Blogs, research, case studies, op-eds, interviews, talks. Kelly talked about how Jacy made a post about “what do we mean by sentience” which is more armchair/less empirical than they prefer to be. In terms of response to data and research we are seeing advocates make intellectual updates but not yet making changes in practice. This is to be expected, change is slow. That’s why the blog about 3 changes that should happen in the animal rights movement was important — it was actionable change. The GM foods case study has been really useful. Clean meat entrepreneurs are grateful and some seem keen to put this knowledge into practice already. Insight that emphasizing moral motivations is important for clean meat industry. GMO failed hard because they were perceived as being profit-driven corporations despite starting as morally-driven startups. Brief conversation about how Lewis Bollard and SI view converge and diverge. Kelly talked about how she and Jacy both presented at the major US AR conference. Kelly spoke at EAG with Kieran Grieg of ACE and helped organize a gender equity mini conference for AR.
Mistakes and updates: Kelly is grateful that CEA still sponsors SI — the 1023 is finally submitted but this took much longer than it should have because the pro-bono lawyers kept pushing it to their backburner.
Perspective updates: Kelly is stepping away from the EA community due to a variety of issues around inclusion, like toxic masculinity in the community and excluding some of the right people. Also Kelly thinks EA has very low intellectual rigor when it comes to nonhuman animals and the inclusionary aspect of movement-building relative to other topics. Kelly added that things may not be as bad as she thinks but perhaps seem more that way because of her frustrating personal history with EA on both fronts. Jacy is still going to engage in EA. This quarter Kelly had a lot of excellent conversations at AR about effective strategizing and now believes that hostility towards EA in the AR community has much more to do with co-optive and bad implementation of EA in AR than with fundamental issues with EA principles themselves. Jonas said that formalizing a framing of “s-risks” made discussions of downside risks more accessible and exciting to x-risk people, perhaps a similar reframing effect increased interest in MCE in EA (and could continue to do so).
Concluding remarks (mostly) from Kelly: Maybe we should be doing more content output for the purposes of advocacy — things that give people harder evidence and doing research that might update AR more on questions we feel we have sufficient evidence on, like the use of cartoonish costumes.
Plans for the upcoming quarter: These include a speaking tour for Jacy. Kelly is considering fundraising more aggressively — at the moment she has been letting the product speak for itself but she could pursue more and deeper conversations about SI’s insights with influencers as well as try more actively to get funds for SI. SI is onboarding Jamie next week. Next week Kelly will be speaking with a couple of directors of large animal sanctuaries. Sanctuaries get bypassed, have a bigger potential role in the movement and haven’t yet been offered tools other groups have in improving their programs. Diana said they might need help with entry and exit surveys in order to evaluate their impact on attitudes. Kelly is trying to finish her moral circle lit review and also said she has underestimated the time going to overhead, but now appreciates that it will probably always be ~75% of her time, which puts SI at an overhead rate of ~15% if any donors care. Jacy is probably going to have time to complete a messaging study, if not this quarter then next quarter. Kelly is going to make the talk she gave at AR into a blog post. Jonas brought up tracking SI’s influence on organizations and individuals more carefully, also for fundraising purposes. Kelly thought this was a good suggestion, just a matter of figuring out how to do this beyond annual survey, e.g. making notes of messaging changes.
Kelly sent out emails and a handful of people got back to her. She couldn’t find the names at that time but said she would get back to us. Diana and Jonas agreed with going ahead with the advisory board in general.
The board meeting closes at 1pm ET.
Board members present: Diana Fleischman, Jonas Vollmer, Kelly Witwicki
Minute takers: Diana Fleischman, Jonas Vollmer
Agenda items:
The board meeting starts at noon ET.
The meeting was held via video call. Diana was appointed as minute taker. Jonas was tasked with editing the minutes after the meeting.
Kelly gave a funding update. While there is less money than they thought initially because of a couple of errors, there is enough of a runway for SI for some time, at least 10 months. Kelly also predicted a greater pool of donors once SI’s work is more widely known.
The board agreed to publish minutes on its website from now on. The board agreed that it will not publish minutes for 2017 because it has not made that many major decisions in the past few months. In case there is demand, SI might publish these minutes at a later date.
The board agreed that Jonas should be the chair of the board (i.e. schedule board meetings, prepare the meeting agenda, take meeting notes). Meetings will be held quarterly from now on.
Several reasons for having a board of advisors were discussed, such as giving people who are already helping with editing and advising some kind of title, or improving SI's credibility. Invitations to the board of advisors should only be given to people for whom this does not cause conflicts of interest. Several potential candidates were discussed.
Jonas was tasked with developing a process for evaluating executive director performance.
Kelly said that the transparency page for SI will gradually get filled out. The board members will have to list disclosures of potential conflicts of interest on that page.
The board meeting closes at 1pm ET.