Thanks for the mention @sonya and the discussion all.
As mentioned above, the governance panel was open to everyone to participate (and Andrew and I only rejected two applications). We believed excluding ECC members would have been exclusionary, and their input was both in the minority (compared to the rest of the panel) and valuable all the same.
Re: Board Members, no one on the Board is currently employed at the ECC, though you are right to be concerned about conflicts. In the case where the Board believes there is conflict, they need to exclude themselves from votes (see this amendment to the bylaws of the Foundation: https://www.zfnd.org/about/incorporation-docs/bylaws_amendment_2/).
I completely agree with this sentiment and believe we are trending in this direction, in the makeup of our Board, our employees, the governance panel experiment, and the grants platform. I think there are further avenues for broadening the base of input into the Foundation and expect we’ll have more opportunities to do so in the future as well.