Externally, we were often confused with other, better-knownorganizations. And internally, many felt that “Open Philanthropy” no longer quite fit. When the name was chosen in 2014, it signaled both our openness to many cause areas and our unusual level of transparency. Back then, we published notes from nearly every conversation we had with experts and even wrote candidly about the potential downsides of new hires. As we grew, that kind of radical transparency didn’t scale well. While we still prioritize openness and sharing our reasoning, these are now part of a broader set of values rather than the centerpiece of our identity.
It was the radical transparency that I found attractive about OP (and GW) a long time ago, which is why this caught my eye. More on how they think about the costs and benefits of information sharing (2016 post by Holden, so I suppose this was a long time coming):
… near-comprehensive information sharing is an appropriate goal for GiveWell, which exists primarily to make recommendations to the public, and emphasizes the transparency of these recommendations as a key reason to follow them. (See GiveWell’s approach to transparency.)
However, we now feel it is not an appropriate goal for the Open Philanthropy Project, whose mission is to give as effectively as we can and share our findings openly so that anyone can build on our work. For our mission, it seems more appropriate to aim for extensive information sharing (well in excess of what other funders currently do) but not to aim for near-comprehensiveness.
This distinction has become more salient to us as our picture of the costs and benefits of information sharing has evolved. This post lays out that evolution, and some changes we plan to make going forward. In brief:
For a number of reasons, we now see greater costs to high-volume information sharing, and lower benefit, than we saw previously.
We’ve taken on projects with increasingly complex and resource-intensive-to-explain justifications, which has both raised the costs of information sharing and lowered the benefits. Since we’re not able to make the full case for our thinking to a general audience, we see few helpful reactions and criticisms via this channel, and we rely on the communities with the most knowledge of our issues – rather than our general audience – for most critical feedback.
We’ve entered into some areas that are subject to controversy, where sharing information publicly can create tangible programmatic risks. (This also pertains to the previous point, since risks can include impairing the quality of feedback we’re able to get from the communities with the most knowledge of our issues.)
We’ve also changed our process for writeups such that our overall efficiency has improved, but costs of information sharing are now higher.
We still see major benefits to openness, but believe we can realize similar benefits with less volume. Our main goal is to help others understand the big picture behind how we think and the reasons for our major choices. We believe we can accomplish this by publicly sharing a lot of information about our thinking rather than publicly explaining each grant and other decision we make.
We have stopped the practice of writing in detail about every grant that we make. We plan to continue to write in detail about many of our grants. We will try to focus on those that are especially representative of our thinking and strategy, or otherwise seem like they would be interesting and helpful to discuss. We will continue to maintain a number of other information sharing practices. We believe that our information sharing will remain much more extensive than what we currently see from other funders.
We have also reduced our use of the term “transparency,” which we think has too strong a connotation of comprehensiveness. We prefer “openness” and “information sharing,” and plan to revise some of the language on our website accordingly.
Open Philanthropy just announced its renaming to Coefficient Giving. There’s coverage in AP, Vox, and Forbes. This is from the story behind their new name (they gave lots of other reasons too, this is just the one that struck me):
It was the radical transparency that I found attractive about OP (and GW) a long time ago, which is why this caught my eye. More on how they think about the costs and benefits of information sharing (2016 post by Holden, so I suppose this was a long time coming):