About

Org Watch is a website to track people and organizations.

Inclusion criteria

At the moment, inclusion criteria for Org Watch are completely arbitrary.

How the site was built

The site is built using PHP for the interface and logic and MySQL for the database. The site design is influenced by Vipul Naik’s websites (e.g. his Donations List Website). You can find the Git repository on GitHub, which has all the code and data.

So far, all of the website code is written by Issa Rice. Sebastian Sanchez, Amana Rice, and Vipul Naik have provided contributions to the data.

Funding is provided by Vipul Naik (see here for the Org Watch funding). That page only covers task payment. The site is developed under work time for Vipul, which is funded by a stipend as well. The stipend payment for AI Watch can be calculated as a percentage of the total stipend depending on how much time I have spent working on this site. Development on Vipul’s time is limited to one day per week (for several more weeks). I will add a calculation here at some point.

Finding people/positions to add to the site was an informal process.

History

Development for AI Watch began on October 23, 2017.

Expansion to positions outside of AI safety (Org Watch) began on June 17, 2018. The Org Watch subdomain became active on June 21, 2018.

Removal requests

The current loose policy is to honor removal requests in cases where both of these conditions are true:

  1. There is a reasonable justification for the information to not be publicly accessible (e.g. someone is transitioning to a career in the mental health space and it is important for future clients to not be able to look up their personal info).
  2. The information is not otherwise publicly accessible: for instance, it’s not easily found on the organization’s website, the person’s LinkedIn, or coverage in media and community posts, or it is in the process of being removed from all the places where it is easily publicly accessible.

If both of these conditions are true and you would like your information to be removed from the site, email Vipul Naik at [email protected].

This policy is not formal or binding or exhaustive or fixed in any way, and Vipul and/or Issa may choose to not honor your request. The policy may change at any time with no notice.

If you reinstate publicly accessible information regarding your position (e.g. by adding back LinkedIn mentions of the position), we may re-add your position to this website at some point in the future. We may or may not notify you about the re-inclusion in this case.

Even if a removal request is honored, you may get re-added to this website in the future if your public profile rises in a different context than the one where you originally requested removal. For instance, suppose you work at Organization A, and that position is tracked here. Then you switch careers to therapy, and request removal (and that request is honored here). Then you quit your therapy job and work at Organization B, which has nothing to do with therapy and there is publicly accessible information stating that you work at Organization B. Then we consider it reasonable to add your position at Organization B to this website. If the fact that you worked at Organization A is publicly verifiable again, we consider it reasonable to add that position to this site again as well. We may or may not notify you about the re-inclusion in this case.

Feedback

If you have feedback for the site, email Issa at [email protected]. You can also add an issue on the GitHub repository. All feedback including praise, criticism, concerns, thoughts on the usability of the site, feature requests, and people or positions that should be added, are appreciated.