Annual General Meetings/2021/Treasurer’s report

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Treasurer’s report for the December 2021 AGM

Unless specified, figures are preliminary, in GBP, and rounded. The comma is used as a thousands separator.

Detailed reports:

The Profit and Loss and the Balance Sheet documents also show the previous three years for convenience.

Key figures

Asset balance (Bank, debts, equipment and depreciation) at the beginning of the period (31 December 2020): £622,008 of which bank balance at the beginning of the period: £551,184

Asset balance today: £783,922 of which bank balance at the end of the period: £613,677

In other words, we have both more in the bank and more in assets. This is mostly explained by support for staffing and the purchase of equipment for the new Dublin data center.

Corporate income is, as always, a significant part of our income, through memberships, SotM sponsorships and donations to support staffing.

Individual memberships are down slightly at £13,487 (2020: £16,219; 2019: £14,500), largely because many people switched to the Active Contributor membership; active member numbers are up significantly.

Donations are shown as down in our preliminary accounts, but a recent large donation is not reflected in the accounts yet. People seem to donate around the end of the year - thank you!

Net profit is up very significantly at £200,839 (2020: £48,477), because we haven't spent the funds we have raised for staffing yet, and had very little costs for SotM.

Significant events

New bank (once again)

A change of bank was the treasurer’s most significant event in 2021. TransferWise (now Wise) unilaterally terminated their relationship with us. We moved our assets to Bank of Ireland (USD, EUR and GBP), and opened backup accounts with fire.com (EUR and GBP).

We are still happily storing our savings at Triodos, where they are slowly accumulating a small bit of interest (£429 this year).

New budget committee

The treasurer has made little progress on setting up a new budget process that will make it easier to reconciliate actual spending with the budget - which we’ve never done before.

This will help us develop an overall plan for long-term support for OSMF infrastructure, and help seek multi-year commitments to support OSM core infrastructure with stability and predictability.

Doing a budget process represents a significant workload for the treasurer. The board has decided to create a Budget Committee to help out. If you are interested in joining, please email treasurer@osmfoundation.org.

Significant new expenses for 2022

The board has raised almost £250k in earmarked donations from companies, chapters and organisations to support the staffing of two priority roles: a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and a Lead Developer/Maintainer for iD.

The earmarked funds are still mostly intact, but we expect spending to go up in 2022.

The first iD maintainer, Quincy, quit at the beginning of the year, and the current maintainer, Martin Raifer, started working in November.

The SRE role took longer to hire due to personal reasons, but Mikel and I expect to send the contract proposal to the person we're hiring in the coming days.

The recently recreated Engineering Working Group expects to fund about £50k in development in 2022.