2009/9/21 Andrew Turvey <andrewrturvey(a)googlemail.com>om>:
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-l1g3…
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.