Ruby AU July Meeting Agenda
Start time: 7:04pm.
Attendees
- Len Garvey (President)
- Jo Cranford (Treasurer)
- Ryan Bigg (Secretary)
- Tom Ridge
- Lauren Hennessey
- Ed Tippett
- Kylie Gusset
- Andre Vidic
RailsCamp 19 (Lauren Hennessey)
- Details posted in Slack about RailsCamp. (to be included here)
- Everything covered financially, a few things not quite yet paid for.
- Decent percentage of women. Len gives Lauren kudos.
- Really positive feedback.
RailsCamp 20
Who will host it?
Where will it be?
When will it be?
- Crickets from the committee.
- We do need a second one because of volunteers.
- Ideally should be in Tasmania, in November.
- Talk to @pat, find people interested in organising through him.
- Setting up a RailsCamp requires local people.
- Saying come to Melbourne in November + February seems like it’s “come to Melbourne” too much.
- Lauren suggests having a Brisbane camp. Tom agrees that it’s a good idea.
- <RailsCamp 21 discussion redacted> (It’s a secret!)
Outcomes:
- Tom to bring hosting a RailsCamp up in Brisbane, possibly at Springbrook again.
- Lauren to talk to Pat and find out if Julian Russel is interested in hosting.
RubyConf AU 2017 (Mel Kaulfauss)
- Mel not present, Jo talking instead.
- 4 tickets sold, 3 are diversity tickets.
- Emailed mailing list about RubyConf.
- Aaron Patterson confirmed on Twitter, Tim Riley, Asia(?) Hammerly
- We have more speakers we’re following up with.
- Small sponsors interested in sponsoring and locking it down.
- Len says that we should be doing some marketing of our own to promote RubyConf AU; at meetups.
- CFP opening soon.
- We’ll be trying to give speakers early feedback in their CFP process.
Outcomes:
- Committee Members to do promotion of the event at meetups that they attend.
- Nailing down the sponsors.
Constitution Rebuild (Mel Sherrin)
Defining the roles for each member of the committee
Outcomes:
- Ryan to chase up Mel Sherrin and get this process started.
“New Committee Member” guide
- “One stop shop” for all committee member contact details (Slack?) (Lauren / Ryan / Andre)
- Where do new committee members read up about their role?
- Responsibility handovers
- Len manages the passwords (as President)
- There are some docs in Google Docs
- Jo suggests having a secretary@ruby.org.au email address for sharing access to different systems for secretary.
- Andre asks: Pat Allan is the “public officer” for Ruby Australia?
- Lauren suggests adding contact details to Slack, and mentioning them in the committee channel.
Outcomes:
- Write some “position descriptions” / “guides” for the committee positions to clarify them. Lauren to work on this.
- Ownership for ruby.au accounts should be an email from the organisation.
- Ryan Bigg to talk to Keith Pitty regarding domain registration.
- Ryan to talk with Pat about being the “public officer” for Ruby Australia, possible transfer required?
Possibility of Ruby AU funding Ruby Together
- Len says that there’s something to explore
- Jo says that the purpose of Ruby AU is to assist events in Ruby Australia, rather than donate to another not-for-profit.
- Kylie says that if we support them, that may set a precedent about who to support in the future. She suggests not supporting anyone. Jo agrees.
Outcomes:;
- No overwhelming support amongst the committee to directly support it.
- The committee can use our platform to direct people to sponsor Ruby Together themselves.
Review of sponsorship (Jo)
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Who will do what to help move it forward
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Jo says that sponsorship should cover two RailsCamps and a conference per year.
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We should try to get more sponsors to put us in a better position.
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Len says that we should have enough money in the bank to “support a complete failure of a camp” (i.e. if a camp had to be cancelled).
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Jo says that she’s gone back through the P&L since RailsCamp Sydney, says that we lost $45k on the Gold Cost Ruby Conference. We have $50k leftover, and we’re using that as a buffer. We’ll be using a fair amount of that to fund a conference in a location that isn’t Melbourne or Sydney.
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It isn’t Ruby.AU’s aim to spend “every last penny” of the money (just so that we have a buffer)
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Jo has a spreadsheet of possible sponsors. We should reach out to them about sponsoring Ruby.AU.
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Len says that we need to provide a value for the company during their sponsoring. Big-tier sponsors get coverage at meetups, conferences, camps and on social media. Sapphire sponsors get to sponsor a single event (up to a max of 5).
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Jo says that we could get a Sapphire sponsor to sponsor a lunch at a conference.
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Len suggests a sponsor could sponsor a camp or a Rails Girls event.
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Andre asks Jo how he can help gather sponsors.
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Jo’s been collecting sponsors logos / blurbs to use across all events, to make it easier for event hosts to talk about who is sponsoring them.
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Kylie suggests getting Atlassian to sponsor. They’re not quite technologically aligned with Ruby, but they may be interested in sponsoring diversity tickets.
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Jo brings up that Vinomofo is interested in hosting.
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Jo says that invoicing sponsors is easy enough to do.
Outcomes:
- Andre and Tom to help Jo out with rounding up / working with the sponsors.
- Jo, Tom & Andre to go through Jo’s spreadsheet of sponsors.
Financial docs (Jo)
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what should we publish and where to? (past records are easy to generate, but future stuff is more difficult and more useful) - also we need to ensure we answer the questions raised at the AGM
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Jo has generated Profit and Loss (P&L) reports. Canberra Camp, last RubyConf and recent Adelaide Camp have been done.
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Jo suggests hosting these reports on the website for the most transparency.
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Len says that we should generate these reports because it’s brought up at AGMs frequently, and it’s also useful to event runners.
Outcomes:
- Jo to generate P&L reports for each quarter, and each evnet.
Website Updates
- Conslidating changes to the Rails app + deployment to heroku
- Membership database specifications (Lauren)
- Indicate to attendees of RailsCamps that they are automatically members of Ruby Australia (André)
- Ryan to get in contact with ruby.org.au domain owner and transfer ownership.
- Ed needs to know what information we want to collect on users & how much to display on the website.
- Len says that it should manage the Campaign Monitor list.
- Jo says it would be a good idea to have a “Camp” / “Conference” list.
- Ryan suggests first name, last name, email address (optional)
- Lauren suggests Twitter handles too. Kylie agrees.
- Jo says that we need to have a privacy policy if we’re collecting users’ data like this.
- Len says that the committee should be able to see the data. Regular users should not be able to see other users data.
- Ed says there’s a Google Doc for memberships. Ben Schwarz has access to it.
Outcomes:
- Ryan to get in contact with ruby.org.au domain owner and transfer ownership.
- Ryan / Ed to deploy the Rails app to Heroku.
- Ed to get in touch with Ben Schwarz for the membership database.
- Kylie to update the committee member list.
Meeting ends: 8:02pm.