2009/9/21 Andrew Turvey <andrewrtur...@googlemail.com>: > Thanks for raising this - good question. > > My understanding is that a large proportion of members in Wikimedia Germany, > for instance, are sleeping members who pay their dues and do nothing else. I > don't think is particularly problematic - you will always end up with some > variation of the 80:20 rule operating (passive and active participants) and > to a large extent the more members and more income you have the better. > > There are two specific issues with sleeping members: if, say, I got 50 > friends to sign up just before the AGM, we could easily arrange to sweep the > board election next year. This was a particular risk when the chapter was > small when it was being started and may be a risk again after the fundraiser > should we end up with large amounts of cash to spend. Lets not make it easy > for people to abuse the process!
The board have to approve all applications - that is a good way of preventing such abuse. You would have to be very careful not to draw attention to the sudden influx of applications. > The other consequence is pretty minor in practice, but there are certain > statutory requirements that relate to a proportion of the membership, such as: > > - At least 10% of members have to be at the AGM to have a valid meeting Unless I'm missing something, the statutory minimum quorum is only 2 members according to the Companies Act 2006 Section 318: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/ukpga_20060046_en_21#pt13-ch3-pb5-l1g318 If so, we just need to amend our Articles if it becomes difficult to achieve a quorum. > - Written resolutions require 50% of members to sign up I can't find any statutory minimum for written resolutions. They have to be circulated to everyone, but since we usually do that by email there is no real cost involved in having more members. Again, it looks like we just need to amend the Articles. > - 10% of the membership can require the directors to call an extraordinary > general meeting That bit is correct. It is only 5% if it has been a year since the last AGM, and it only takes 5% to require a written resolution to be distributed, but even those could become a problem. It is unlikely to ever be an issue, though - it's only things that can't wait until the next AGM that require these provisions. > Having said all this, my view is that now would be an appropriate time to > make the membership process easier - especially given our target of 100 > members by the next AGM. We haven't really done much to attract members yet. There was that watchlist geonotice, but I expect most people were put off by there being far too many links and many of them leading to pages that hadn't been written when the notice first went up. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
