On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 2:12 PM, AndrewRT raturvey@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
On Jan 15, 8:19 am, "Michael Bimmler" mbimm...@gmail.com wrote:
Many thanks for your reply here Michael - very interesting to hear your perspective on that!
(In a perfect world, every board member would "work" the same amount of time for the chapter...
I'm not sure that's even desirable. Different candidates have different personal circumstances and can be valuable contributors even if they give different amounts of time. One board member who is an expert, say, in legal matters and just turns up to meetings can be extremely useful alongside perhaps a keen student who has lots of spare time and spends 20 hours a week organising projects.
Oh absolutely. This was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek note to indicate that...well, let me put this nicely... there have been times when certain board members did basically nothing. Which should, obviously, be avoided (...through elections) ;-)
In a newspaper interview, I once said "7-10 hours" [per week], which wasn't a bad estimate then. It has decreased a bit as of late (as I've been doing more ChapCom etc. stuff...and as I have started to work-to-earn-money)
By way of background I would add that Michael is the President of the Swiss Wikimedia chapter, which has 62 members and had an income of ~ £23,000 in 2007.
Right. For the record (and because I do enjoy boasting...), we have just yesterday published our stats for 2008, we have earned almost £38,000 in 2008, whereof £23,250 during the official fundraiser.
Our membership number (which is somewhere >70 by now) is the thing that I personally consider to be one of our strongest weaknesses...I believe that a higher number of members would increase our visibility (people tend to talk about associations they're member of their friends), ensure a steady (albeit comparatively small) stream of revenue (fees...) and allow for a larger pool of volunteers for various events and projects. In Wikimedia CH, most if not all events and long-term projects were handled by the board plus a set of about five to ten volunteers. I think this was a too small number of people and I greatly regret that we did not manage to diversify there...we did run into problems at times when we were asked to cooperate in eg. an event and would have greatly liked to and also had the financial resources to do so but just lacked the "human resources"...
I wonder whether at times there should be "membership raisers" rather than fundraisers, but this might just be me putting so much emphasis on that.
Cheers, Michael