First of all, I'd like to say how thrilled I am to see this discussion happening. A lack of interest in the running of the chapter from members has been one of my biggest concerns, so it is great to see members discussing how the chapter is doing and holding the board the account.
That, in fact, is our greatest defence against people taking over the chapter and taking all the money. I'd have to look a few things up to be sure, but what Tom describes could be possible. It certainly won't be once we are a registered charity, since the necessary constitutional change would require Charity Commission approval, which they would never give. Until then, it might be possible to amend the constitution like that. It would require 67% support, though, which I think is unlikely to happen. Our contractual obligations to the WMF provide some protection too. They oblige us to keep to the Wikimedia mission, so we would need to revoke them before we could distributed money to members. Regarding the proportion of our expenditure that goes on admin, I think the current layout of the budget is a little misleading. The Office Manager will probably do quite a lot of programmes work, at least for the first year or so while there aren't many other staff members. The Chapter Manager will also do a lot of programmes work and the Comms person is probably entirely programmes, really. We indend to monitor how much time staff spend on different things. Our report at the end of the year will divide their salaries, etc., between the different things that they worked on, so we'll have an accurate ratio of admin to programmes. As for investing our reserves, we are investigating it. I think certificates of deposit are probably the way to go. In the current market, you won't get anywhere near 4% unless you are willing to lock up the money for several years. For the 6 month to 1 year bonds that we would be interested in, the rates are about 1-2%. See here for some examples: http://www.lloydstsb.com/rates_and_charges/savings/term_deposits.asp _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
