Ruby Australia Committee Meeting Minutes
19th of August, 2015 - 7:00pm AEST
Held via GotoMeeting
Committee Members Present
- Sebastian VonConrad - President
- Melissa Kaulfuss - Vice President
- Matt Allen - Treasurer
- Mikel Lindsaar - Secretary
- Amanda Neumann
- Leonard Garvey
- Rob Jacoby
- John Barton
Appologies
Agenda
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Welcome / Apologies / Agenda Amendments
- Welcome to all people.
- No apologies.
- Two agenda amendments - Mel wanted to talk about sponsorship. John
wanted to talk about business, Secretary proposed doing this in it’s
own section about the 3 things.
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Previous minutes
- Motion to accept last minutes as correct, proposed by Secretary,
seconded by Rob Jacoby, no opposition, passed.
- Motion to accept last minutes as correct, proposed by Secretary,
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Matters arising from previous meeting:
- Minutes to be written up and published - DONE
- Mel to be gotten on website - DONE
- Len to be gotten on website - DONE
- Rob to start a CFP and launch ticket sales for Ruby Australia on August 1 - DONE
- Mikel & Matt to finish putting the sponsorship prospectus together - Now
on hold - Mikel & John to bring plan forward regarding new businesses into rails -
Now moving forward - Sebastian to get constitution access to Mikel to be published online -
to be done this month
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President’s report
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Not much, president has been away on holiday.
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Will be more active this month.
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Treasurer’s report
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Paid deposits on conference stuff
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Some money has come in on ticket sales
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Sponsorship, is unable to give this the headspace to make it happen
and needs some help in getting the headspace on this. Amanda asked
about if this is conference or general. Matt: Both. Sebastian: I
am going to take this over, what we are doing to look at annual
that covers both is the right idea, but right now we should make
sure we get the conference handled and fundraise on that. Mikel:
there is no reason we can’t convert after. Sebastian: we need
to focus on what has worked before, not changing right now.
Rob: We have Rails camp as well right? Sebastian: Yes, we have
some buffer for Rails camp, but I need to focus on conference
for now to make that happen. Matt: We have about $50-$100k in
the pipeline, I can help with this, but not on the packages etc
Sebastian: I think we’ll get it done, we just need to move quickly,
we have enough data so I’ll get this rolling. -
Have some end of year accounting things to do.
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Review Main Activities
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Ruby Conference
- CFP is open, ticket sales have started. 8 tickets sold, 3 general
and 5 group. 31 proposals submitted so far. Other than that we
are monitoring and will ramp up the communication as the month
progresses. Realistically not much else to report.
- CFP is open, ticket sales have started. 8 tickets sold, 3 general
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Event Knowledge Project Update
- Leonard: Not super organised at this point. Have some knowledge
but need to get moving. RailsCamp needs about $15k to run. I
need to get a bit more organised. Has been busy moving to Melbourne. - Sebastian: Any help needed? Len: Not yet. good to go. Mikel:
last month was to get Len access to guides. Len: this was done
so all good. What needs to happen to get a list of ideas out there
to list out. - Rob: I want to hand over details, so make sure we have contact
details, which is not really a public repo material. Len: that’s
one of the reasons RailsCamp in slack is a private channel
because some of the stuff is private. We can handle it with
a secret gist or slack.
- Leonard: Not super organised at this point. Have some knowledge
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New People into the Community Project Update
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Amanda was a huge help, managed to organise a catchup with 8-9
people. Got together and discussed some things we have captured
in a trello board. Set some high level goals and basic direction
for the working group. It’s in the trello. Came up with some
ideas we could vote on and implement. Include things like “Central
place for ruby tech activities”. Forum for RoRo format for newbies
to attend / give talks etc. Perhaps another newbies night.
Encourage diversity that span new, mid to expert. Avenues for
feedback to broadern things and how to get in touch with the ruby
community. Maybe update to twitter. -
Has been two railsgirls sponsorships requests - Perth and Adelaide.
We need a single appraoch for these things. Need to define a process
around this so we have a standard response. -
Capture knowledge about RailsGirls to get the data about how to run
these events, would be good to be able to help other places to
actually run one of these events. -
Amanda: Need a bit of a landing page that guides people how to get
things rolling. Len: would be great for any rails girls to use
Ruby Australia to get this done. Amanda: Would be great to get
a bunch of sponsors in this. -
John: Something worked well in GoLang, we did a whole quarter of
code ramp up from beginner through to advanced. -
Matt: I can handle all payments handling, they can pay into Ruby
Australia via Xero and then RubyAU can make the payments for
t-shirts and things. -
Amanda: Will get more data and bring more information next meeting
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Ruby to the Business Project Update
- Mikel: Hanging over chair to John Barton.
- Just want to make sure on the direction - focus on building the
ecosystem economy of the ruby community - Not a lot of progress at this point. But 2 action items, (1) was
with Liam Essler to do a survey actoss businesses, Liam was on
leave and I was away, so nothing done yet. (2) I had a meeting
with Lenny Mayo from Startups Victoria. They are seeing the same
thing, a little bit of a trend away from Ruby due to lack of
resources. Three points from Lenny’s point of view:- startup events are becoming less technical, need to cross
pollinate and we need to help with that and can lift our profile. - strong story about how to get involved in the ruby community.
- universities can be a good strong component. This could definitely
help to improve things as universities are focused on static type
languages as big enterprises are in there
- startup events are becoming less technical, need to cross
- What leads to successfully choosing the first employee, showcase
an example of this sort of thing. - Having this data in a legit surveyed form will help us massively
in talking with universities. - We might need to use some funds to get some serious industry
analysis and data gathering. Hopefully in 1-2 meetings will have
a request for money to make this official. - Rob: Would it be fair to say that everyone is hiring and no one
is looking for work. Could we help train companies to mentor
juniors. Matt: Perhaps something like a Ruby Australia trainee
program, not sure how to do that. Amanda: One way to do this is
to help with mentorship from the community. Mikel: DevHub currently
does a bunch of this and is successful and we could support and grow
that to a larger scale. - Rob: My focus is on the busines and 3 year outlook, not for next year.
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General Business
- Melissa: With regards to merging all roro groups, Melbourne, Canberra,
Sydney. Rob: I’ll ask Nigel this week and push it thorugh. Melissa: to
get the account. - Sebastian: Any of the working group chairs please talk to me and I’ll do
what I can to help
- Melissa: With regards to merging all roro groups, Melbourne, Canberra,
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Next Meeting
- Wednesday the 16th of September. 7pm.
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Targets for following month
- Mikel to get minutes online
- Sebastian to get Mikel the constitution to get it online
- Matt & Melissa to setup Meetup.com account under Ruby Australia
- Sebastian to get started on sponsorship taking over from Matt
- Working group chairs to come back with next steps
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End of Meeting