On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 2:12 PM, AndrewRT <raturvey(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
On Jan 15, 8:19 am, "Michael Bimmler"
<mbimm...(a)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
--
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler(a)gmail.com