Gordon Joly <mailto:gordon.joly@pobox.com>
17 December 2014 09:56
"...our CEO..."
The interim CEO?
Gordo
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Michael Maggs <mailto:Michael@maggs.name>
17 December 2014 07:26
The WMUK board's regular two-day strategy overview meeting was held in
Cambridge last weekend. This is the time of year when we focus on
future plans and we were joined by our interim CEO, D’Arcy Myers, who
provided us with fresh perspectives from the point of view of a
relative newcomer.
The minutes of the meeting are being prepared, and should be available
within the next week, but the board felt that it would be useful to
publish a guide to the broad challenges that face us, and how we are
tackling them.
One of the tasks of the meeting was to review the third quarter
financial report, which included a consideration of the full impact of
Wikimania. The WMUK office ended up playing a larger role than had
originally been anticipated, and the charity's costs on both staff and
Wikimania-related programmes in the third quarter of the year has been
significantly higher than anticipated. At the same time, the Funds
Distribution Committee of the Wikimedia Foundation has indicated that
it will not recommend granting WMUK the full amount we requested for
the 2015-16 financial year.
These factors mean that the board needs to review our plans for the
coming year in the light of the reduced funds available to us, and to
ensure that in spite of financial constraints our reserves are not
allowed to drop to an unacceptably low level.
It is inevitable that over the next year the charity will need
significantly to reduce its direct expenditure, both on overheads and
on programmes, and over the next few weeks our CEO will be working on
his recommendations for a detailed action plan to achieve that. The
focus will be not on 'business as usual' and salami-slicing our
existing expenditure, but on the opportunity we have to re-direct our
energies towards those programmes that are most able to provide us
with high charitable impact when weighed against the resources
required (direct costs, staff costs, number of willing and skilled
volunteers available and so on).
We need to prioritise, and to accept that we no longer have the luxury
of being able to support highly-resourced programmes that do not
provide a commensurate level of direct charitable impact when measured
against our strategic goals. There are an almost infinite number of
useful free knowledge projects we could be involved in, including many
which are directly aligned with our goals. But we have to have the
courage to turn projects down and acknowledge that our charitable aims
are best met by doing a limited number of projects exceptionally well
than accepting a multitude of ideas that we don't have the resources
to follow up on.
Of course, the resources available to us are not fixed, and we will be
making significant directed efforts to increase both volunteer
resources and also locally-sourced finance via UK-based fundraising
and gifts in kind. The extent to which we are able to accept and
support project ideas for which we have insufficient core funding is
likely to depend on whether the project has a sufficiently large and
skilled group of enthusiastic volunteers who are able to lead and run
it with minimal staff help, and whether it is of interest to external
grant-makers who can be persuaded to cover the non-core costs.
Once the CEO has a draft action plan and 2015-16 budget prepared, they
will be shared with the community for comment and suggestions before
coming to the board for approval of a financially sustainable package
of activities geared to achieving our agreed strategy. We are happy to
accept general questions on this, but of course we can't discuss
anything relating to internal HR or staffing issues.
Best regards
Michael
____________
Michael Maggs
Chair, Wikimedia UK
for the board