Introducing The Observatory

Welcome to The Observatory! This newsletter aims to share insights and information from the Effective Institutions Project. At EIP, we conduct research and devise strategies to prompt the world’s most important institutions to take actions that lead to better outcomes for humanity. While we’re active in many different areas, the core of our work is driven by an ongoing effort to monitor what these key institutions are doing and interpret what it all means for the rest of us. The Observatory is an opportunity for us to share some of what we’re learning through that process with the wider world.

Our current plan is to publish two kinds of content in The Observatory. Every other month, we’ll share a broad round-up of recent developments at important institutions around the world, along with our take on what they mean for people’s lives. These updates will not be anchored to any particular theme but instead will be curated based on our judgment about which global challenges and opportunities seem generally most consequential for people today and in the future. That curation will be rooted in the same prioritization framework that we’ve used in the past to drive our landscape analysis of important institutions and grant recommendations to donors in our network.

In addition, we’ll publish occasional bulletins covering our views and insights on specific issues that may be in the news or timely for some other reason. We’re kicking things off in this vein with a primer on AI governance. We hope you enjoy it, and please let us know what you think!