Committee Meeting - 19th August 2015

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

  1. 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.
  2. Previous minutes

    • Motion to accept last minutes as correct, proposed by Secretary,
      seconded by Rob Jacoby, no opposition, passed.
  3. 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
  4. President’s report

    • Not much, president has been away on holiday.

    • Will be more active this month.

  5. Treasurer’s report

    • Paid deposits on conference stuff

    • Some money has come in on ticket sales

    • 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.

  6. Review Main Activities

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. New People into the Community Project Update

      • 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

    4. 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
      • 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.
  7. 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
  8. Next Meeting

    • Wednesday the 16th of September. 7pm.
  9. 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
  10. End of Meeting