ARC minutes 2018-09-06
ARC Minutes 6th September 2018, held at Europoint House in London.
Housekeeping
Present
Board: Carol Campbell, Susan Williams, Jane Carlin, Marnie Woodward. Staff: Davina Johnson, Katie Crampton (minuting).
Apologies
Greyham Dawes, Kate West, Jordan Landes, Sandy, Alistair
Notes of the previous meeting
Jane is a CFO not a CEO, and has a background in publishing rather than charity.
Matters arising
A black and white version of the Strategic Report needs to be made available. Jane and Marnie are to decide whether to do a Strategic Report next year or to return to the Annual Review.
Action for Carol to ask Sandy to send Risk Register to Jane and Marnie, it was not covered in the meeting as Chief Executive was not in attendance.
The new Data Protection Policy drafted for GDPR needs to state records to be kept for seven years rather than the three years it currently has. Insurance records are obliged to be kept for 40 years. Action for Susan to look at retention dates.
Review and approval of QFMR for Q2
Q2 is the half way stage through the year, and we can begin to see how we are performing against our budget. The major positive variances were in the staff costs, as staff were working in different areas than originally budgeted for, due to absences in the SMT. We have savings on staff costs with new staff starting later than scheduled. 3k of the difference is the NI small employers credit.
Donations are down, which was expected during Lucy’s absence. This means that results for the year are very unlikely to meet budget and the deficit for the year may well be around £30k. We have sufficient reserves to cover this and we should normalise the budget for next year, and Lucy to be asked to give reassurance to the board that this is possible.
Financial Policy and Procedure
The Financial Policy went out for community consultation, and received no feedback so is similar to last viewing by ARC. Financial Procedures do not go to community consultation as they are an internal document.
Davina checked both documents against CC8 and is confident everything has been covered. The only part in CC8 not included was the staff loans. Carol was happy to go with the statutory maximum and include it in the document for board distribution.
Marnie noted 8.d needs editing to say E to F rather than 5 to 8.
Risk Register
This was not reviewed at the meeting. A full review should take place in December.
IT consultant
An outsourced tech consultant has resigned due to time constraints.
There was concern that the Wikimedia UK are not receiving what was contracted for from one of our tech consultants. There is also concern that the community should be receiving more tech support.
Given the resignation of Emmanuel the board should be asked to give a lead on the future tech strategy, so that an operational way forward can be agreed.
Carol has provisionally arranged for Michael and Doug to lead a working group to agree a way forward and support recruitment, a tech volunteer should be part of this group to make sure the community needs are supported.The board should review whether Wikimedia UK need to re-establish the tech committee.
It was noted that at the time the consultants were appointed outsourcing to a tech company was too expensive.
GDPR
GDPR is tied into the migration of Civi onto the new servers. So far 1,000 records have been deleted.
Bank and online mandate
Marnie to be added to the bank mandate. Jane will not be added at present. A formal resolution will need to be made by the board for the bank mandate changes.
AOB
For the Mayor’s Digital Skills Tender, if we get through to the next round Lucy should be asked if she is comfortable with managing the work. ARC also recommends that clarity around the grant/ contract terminology should be given, if it is contracted we need to check if there are penalties for under performance.
Date of next meeting
5th December 2018.