As part of the IIDM working group, we are running a survey to help us refine the scope of improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) as a cause area. Please click here to share your views. 

Background: While IIDM has drawn strong interest from the EA community, people often come to it with different ideas about what IIDM looks like or means in practice. Because of this wide range of potential definitions, the concept can seem fuzzy or overly broad to some. One of the core goals of our initiative is to better define IIDM so that rigorous analysis can be applied to it, and we and others can make more confident recommendations for funding and careers going forwards. (A first step toward creating a working definition of IIDM was included in our post announcing the working group late last year, which also includes a fuller description of our activities).

This survey will be used to gauge the diversity of perspectives in the EA community on what “counts” as IIDM. This helps us understand what the community thinks is important and has the most potential for impact, and in turn shapes the rest of our work. Concretely, for example, it will help us decide what topics we should cover in a directory of resources about IIDM. 

We are interested in your view regardless of whether you think IIDM should be amongst the top priorities or whether you’re sceptical. You’ll be presented with a list of topics and asked to rate how “in scope” you consider them to be. Depending on how familiar you are with the topics, we expect the survey will take you 10-25 minutes to complete.

This survey complements our other efforts to define the scope of IIDM. For example, we are attempting to disentangle IIDM from a more theoretical point of view. If you’re interested in helping with this or have other thoughts on how to develop IIDM, please get in touch with Ian David Moss, Laura Green or Vicky Clayton on improvinginstitutions@gmail.com.  

The survey will remain open until 28th April. Thanks in advance and we look forward to sharing the results with you in the next month or two! 

With particular thanks to Ishita Batra who developed the survey and in advance to Dilhan Perera who will be analysing the survey.