Organization for Transformative Works – Board of Directors
Minutes of the meeting: 02 April 2022, 20:00 UTC
Present
- Kari Dayton
- Antonius Melisse
- Rebecca Sentance
- E. Anna Szegedi
- Alex Tischer
- Jess White
Guests
- coprime
- Irina
- pitytheviolins
- Echolight
- Arvion
- ereidivh
- zeke
- yachtzee
- cmdonovann
- Linya
- Kaysa
- quoth-the-ravenclaw
- hexenmeister
- silverandblue
- darhein
- Kittywarrior101
- Shade
- punk
Open Session
Decisions taken since last Meeting
- Approved minutes of last meeting
- Approved payment requests from Systems (support for Virtual Machine infrastructure, Network File System backup servers), AD&T (anti spam), Finance (audit) and Development and Membership (donation premiums)
- Approved Legal submitting comments for Hong Kong copyright consultation, signing on for SHOP SAFE letter, commenting on a US Copyright Technical Measures Consultation
- Approved Project Manager for Systems
- Approved chair track staff for Communications
- Approved staff for Tag Wrangling, Open Doors, Translation and Fanlore
- Started assessing candidates for Diversity Consultant Research Officer Role
- Ongoing communications/answering questions
Finance update
Financials as of December 31, 2021
We’re holding about $1million in operating cash that is about twice the amount of our annual operating costs. There is another $1million in reserves due to highly successful fundraisers in the past. The current plan for the reserves is to hold the money for paid staff in the future.It’s been talked about before in the past and we’re still working out the details, but it’s a rather expensive undertaking that will result in large annual expenses in addition to the initial cost of implementation.
Endowments may still be an option for the future but at this point in time it’s my judgement that it’s not currently our best option. Depending on the type of endowment it may permanently restrict some of our assets which will also limit our future expansion. It would also require additional volunteers to set up the endowment and either a volunteer to manage it directly or to manage the person/firm we hire to manage it for us, which would severely increase our workload at this point
The preference is to simply have an investment fund set up where we don’t need to create a separate organization or severely restrict the initial capital. The Finance committee has made a few steps towards this goal but one of the members most well versed in investments left so that had been left in the backburner. The plan now is to try to recruit an investment specialist sometime this year and get this project back on track.
Operating expenses for 2021 are roughly $430k, with almost $300k of that being spent on AO3, and roughly 70% of total expenses spent on programs versus fundraising & general administration. Expenses for AO3 have increased due to the increased monthly server collocation costs due to increased traffic on the site.
Questions:
Would there be any interest in investing in cryptocurrency?
No. Cryptocurrency is a very new and volatile market with way too many unknowns.
Do you know which pool of money you’ll be taking from for the Diversity Consultant?
It will be part of our operating costs, which comes from our cash. There wouldn’t be a need to designate a new account or fund for this expense.
AOB
no items, answered some clarifying questions from people attending
The meeting was adjourned at 21:00 UTC
Minutes approved by the Board on 26/04/22