I am looking at the budget. £123k on admin, £455k on programme expenditure, of which £290k is going straight to the WMF anyway. Even assuming the WMF is completely efficient, that’s over 20% of expenditure going to admin.
http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/2011_Budget
Looking at income is irrelevant since we seem to be consistently missing our expenditure targets and thus ending the year with money left over. (If the £455k target is missed as seems likely then the admin expenditure chunk will be higher still.)
A question for the treasurer while I’m paying some attention to this stuff: what interest rate are we currently earning on our half million? If they’re less than around 4% or something how do you justify this.
And a question for whoever understands company law: would the following be possible in theory:
1) I find a group of 5 people who want to stand for the board on a platform of giving back the entire earnings of WMUK to the membership
2) We stand, we’re voted in because everyone there wanted £500 (which is about our assets to members ratio at the moment).
3) We change the constitution as necessary, getting it past an EGM again because people want £500.
4) We do it.
With our current company status I’m worried this might be possible. And obviously the more money we have sitting in our bank account the more tempting this starts to look for our membership. This is yet another reason why our current level of income is a bad thing not a good one. I was sceptical about entering the first fundraiser before we were ready. Given we failed to spend that money we clearly weren’t, so doing the second one really wasn’t in anyone’s best interest.
Tom
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Roger Bamkin
Sent: 27 February 2011 17:12
To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] job descriptions
Tom, you are not comparing next years budget are you with last years activity? Staff paid for last year was one person part time I understood and income was around 500,000 pounds. That seems pretty efficient to me or am I missing something?
regards
Roger
On 27 February 2011 16:53, Tom Holden <tom.holden@economics.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
Gulp. If people knew WMUK's overhead to activity ratio do you think they'd still be happy to donate? Or a similar question, do you think a £1 given to WMUK does more for the interests of UK Wikimedians than £1 direct to Wikimedia? I note that the bulk of your programme expenditure is going straight to the WMF anyway, so all that's happening is that the money's being processed by WMUK's (less efficient, due to lower scale) system, then going to the WMF (with additional overheads from them). Indeed it seems that it's only going to their international projects which is arguably further from the interests of UK Wikimedians than server/code expenditure is.
I don't know the details of what you're doing at the moment so maybe I'm completely wrong. But my distinct impression at the moment is that UK donations would be much more effective if they went straight to the WMF then groups of users petitioned them for money for UK specific projects. Perhaps something like WMUK could intermediate, but it could certainly be a much lighter organisation.
Admittedly charitable status if it ever arrives will change this story, providing the gains from gift aid outweigh the relative inefficiencies of WMUK. Even this isn't totally obvious at the moment, particularly as unclear whether the things WMUK is spending money on are more useful to the average user of Wikimedia projects than what the WMF project is spending money on.
I hope to hear some serious arguments about the chapter's efficiency at the next AGM. I also hope for the chance for some significant input from the membership on expenditure priorities.
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimediauk-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Turvey
Sent: 27 February 2011 15:57
To: WMUK-L
Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] job descriptions
In advance of the board meeting next Tuesday, I've started drafting up some job descriptions on the wiki at http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Job_Descriptions for the new members of staff that we are recruiting.
Please add your contributions on the main and talk page to develop this.
Many thanks,
Andrew
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--
Roger Bamkin
(aka Victuallers)