Meetings/October 1, 2005

A Board meeting was held on IRC on October 1, to discuss and approve the Foundation budget for 2005Q4. The meeting was attended by the Board of Trustees (Angela Beesley, Michael Davis, Florence Devouard, Tim Shell, and Jimmy Wales), the Chief Financial Officer (Daniel Mayer), and the Local Chapters Coordinator (Delphine Ménard).

The budget is posted at: Budget/2005

The following points were discussed during the meeting:


 * Hardware costs: $190,000
 * We failed to spend all budgeted funds in previous quarter; however, this was not because we did not need the new servers but because of lack of money and time. Hence we should not adjust 4th quarter expenses down.
 * Domas Mitzuas will itemize hardware needs and assign dollar amounts to each item


 * Hosting charges: $24,000
 * New servers will lead to faster site will lead to dramatic increase in bandwidth costs
 * Will see about moving images to other servers where we are given free bandwidth


 * Domain names: $500
 * Domains set to expire will cost around $100
 * Additional money allocated for new domains that are donated or which we might plausibly want to use
 * Disagreement about how aggressive we should be gobbling up new domains, with Jimmy, Daniel, and Michael arguing for aggressiveness, which strategy we shall use for time being. Further debate to follow.


 * Personel:
 * Estimated insuarance and tax costs on top of regular salary for executive assistant and chief technical officer.
 * Office assistant needed for routine tasks such as stuffing envelopes, which executive assistant is far too busy for; will try to get volunteers for this position, but budgeted $3000 for a part-time (20 hours per week) employee.
 * Hardware assistant item increased from $1500 to $2000 in anticipation of many new servers being purchased


 * Travel:
 * $7500 for travel will include 3 persons to WSIS in Tunis
 * For sake of transparency, Daniel will publish actual travel expenses as he gets better access to relevant data


 * Legal expenses, insurance, and trademarks:
 * Bumped up to $10,000 from $4000
 * anticipating more in the way of trademark applications
 * Will be getting legal insurance, which is an unknown cost but possibly more expensive then previously anticipated
 * Part of this is money to be set aside as a reserve for future legal issues


 * Office expenses:
 * $5900 for rent plus furniture and a new computer; WMF now occupying a larger office with more people (executive assistant, office assistants in near future), hence an increase in office expenses.


 * Chapter startup money:
 * $2000 a quarter as decided upon last budget meeting, with nothing new causing us to change this


 * Promotional:
 * 3000 to cover some but not all of the items listed here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_budget/2005/Q4/promo


 * Financial costs
 * Fees related to fundraising, estimated to be $10,000 for every $200,000 we raise


 * Miscellaneous expenses:
 * Set at around 2% of total budget, or $6000


 * Reserve:
 * Set at around 10% of budget, or $29,200


 * Next fund drive:
 * Current accounts are $160,000 short of budgeted expenses
 * New drive to start December 1
 * Details to be worked out at next fundraising meeting, to be scheduled soon