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