As for maintaining the branch, I think it is useful to have more traditional formal structures anytime you are dealing with members' money - there's a certain amount of discipline that gets imposed on elected officials, hopefully resulting in transparency of decision-making and financial accountability.
The best way for me to deal with this is to look at the current receipts and expenditures for ANZSI and examine how these might be reduced. In other words, what's the minimum amount of money necessary to run ANZSI? Once we've established that we can look at how it might be raised. And I want to emphasise again that I am not talking about the Branches here, which all have their own financial arrangements, but the Council level.
The main source of Council revenue is membership fees, though I believe that a small percentage of conference receipts is also taken. Some of the fees are passed on to Branches on a pro-rata basis, but those members who have chosen not to be in any Branch end up with all their fees going to the Council.
As far as I know there is no practical reason why Branch Committees could not collect membership fees directly, then pass membership information on to the Membership Secretary.
Council expenditures can be divided into four types:
1. Administrative expenses. These are expenses involved in running the Council, and would cease if the Council was disbanded. They include things like booking meeting rooms and reimbursing travel costs for Council members travelling to meetings.
2. Pro-rata subsidies, etc, paid to the Branches. Clearly if the Branches were to collect membership fees directly then there would be no need for these.
3. Service-related expenses. These includes postage on the Newsletter, the Newsletter editor's fee, web hosting costs, the costs of the current web redevelopment, etc. Registration -- which is now barely used anyway -- is a self-funded service. So is mentoring. Obviously removing the services would eliminate these costs, as would replacing them with free alternatives. The Newsletter can be replaced by a free mailing list, for instance.
4. The Council used to pay honoraria, but these have now been dropped.
The only ANZSI Council-level service I would vote for continuing to spend money on is the membership/Indexers Available database and the website -- or rather, a redesigned website based on community participation, which would include the member database and Indexers Available as part of its basic structure.
There are many free web hosts available who could support this but -- and this might just reflect my own prejudice -- using one would put ANZSI in an awkward position should the host system crash or the host decide to shut it down. My gut feeling is that ANZSI should have a paid website system.
How much will that cost? That depends on two related things: firstly, how much control ANZSI wants to have over the appearance and contents of the site, and secondly, how much work the ANZSI webmaster is willing to put it for free. Let's look at two scenarios:
a) Bryght - www.bryght.com - offers a community web hosting system for $US20 per month. They take care of the details and support individual group members posting their own material. The job of webmaster in a Bryght system would consist of one or two hours a week screening out unacceptable material, and occasionally setting up new topics.
b) A 'traditional' system like the current ANZSI website where every feature is hand-coded by the webmaster and no-one else has access to this material. In other words the webmaster would have to spend forty or fifty hours setting up the site and then work for seven or eight hours a week to maintain it as active and current. The cost - about $A30 per month, plus the ongoing cost of domain name registration - about another $2 per month.
In other words the cost of an easy, low-maintenance website is more or less the same as that of a high-maintenance website, and the actual amount of money that ANZSI needs to run over and above Branch level is on the order of $300 per year. By relinquishing fine control and using an off-the-shelf hosting system we can also reduce the webmaster's workload by a factor of four or five.
There are several ways we could obtain the necessary funds:
- One Branch could take responsibility for the ANZSI website and levy a small fee on the other Branches. (The responsibility could even rotate every year or two.)
- All Branches could appoint and fund a Webmaster to set up and pay for the site and invoice each Branch separately on a pro-rata basis. This makes sense from the web host's point of view because they prefer to invoice and deal with a skilled individual.
- The current funds held by the Council could be put into a term deposit and the interest used to pay website costs.