Committee Meeting - 20th December 2016

Ruby Australia Meetings
1

Ruby AU December Meeting Agenda

Starts: 7:36pm
All present

Welcome new members

  • :wave: - Ana, Toby, Rachelle & Anton!

AGM resolutions (bank card / constitution / committee stacking)

  • Didn’t talk about bank card - we will discuss it on the Committee a little later
  • Constitution was talked about, notifications will go out about the new version to the new members in the new year, with final approval being done at the next RailsCamp.
  • Nobody thought Committee Stacking was much of an issue, so that’s been tabled for now.

Post-RailsCamp update

  • People had bad opinions about the overall food.
  • Christmas dinner went over very well.
  • Cheese and meat platters were well received too.
  • $68.33 over budget.
  • Mac Mini will be upgraded by Luke Chadwick (dockerised?)
  • Event went alright overall
  • 60 people attended

RailsCamp inventory tracking

  • Tom will check with Rob Jacoby regarding the inventory.

Developer Survey

  • Tom and Lauren have been talking about running this in the new year, when we have the membership database ready.

How did we go with adding articles to the app?

  • Went well with the consitution page. We should follow the same process if we want to add further pages.

Bank Card resolution

  • Jo - unsure of what documentation bank requires to re-issue card. Suggests that it could just be documented in the committee minutes for approval.
  • Committee agrees that the bank card can be reissued.

Annual statements for 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Consumer Affairs Victoria

  • Accountants should be handling this. Jo and Ryan to follow up.

Membership database

  • Mitchell from TwoRedKites expressed interest in building this database too. Tom wil need to talk with Ed Tippett who wrote the initial version.
  • Looking for volunteers to help out.

Communication & Infrastructure

  • Anton wants to focus on building better infrastructure for communicating between members. He has written up his goal as a comment on these minutes

  • Anton suggests moving the rails-oceania group to a forum instead.

  • He also suggested centralising documentation on GitHub.

  • Committee - Public general event guides can go on GitHub, but sometimes it’s helpful to share event-specific stuff through Google Drive.

  • Lauren says Google Drive is a good way to share documentation amongst a team which is running a conference.

  • Jo talked about RubyConf documentation being private, because it contains things about what the organisers haven’t done well – Documentation written by the organisers – and perhaps we don’t want to make that public.

  • Lauren suggests having a small guide of something like “So you’re thinking of running a RailsCamp/RubyConf” and then a larger group of guides for running those events.

  • Ryan suggests Anton could help with the porting of the Constitution documentation to Markdown, which Kevin Yank is currently attending to.

  • Jo - not having a membership database hurts us when it comes to communicating with our members.

  • Toby - forums can have spam problems, who will moderate them?

  • Anton - we could link forum accounts to membership database.

  • Lauren - we can’t just switch from the google group to the forum system instantly. What kind of system would we use? Would we build it as a part of the website?

  • Ryan - building our own forum system wouldn’t be a good idea. Discourse would be better.

  • Toby - Discourse posts a digest which could be a good way to prompt people over to the forum

  • Lauren - Anton: so what are you going to be doing first (re: communication & infrastructure)

  • Discussion on what to be done will be taken offline and discussed on the #committee channel.

Permissions/admin accounts

  • Lauren - I’ve been reaching out to people regarding the permissions that they have access to. Looking to clear out old memberships.
  • Lauren - Ryan or Tom to have same access as Lauren for safety issues.
  • Ryan - Happy to have access to the passwords/slack/whatever.
  • Lauren - Should we remove old permissions from Slack, such as Mikel & Pat? Jo - We shouldn’t remove Pat because he has an honorary role.
  • Tom - If they’re not actively involved then they should be removed.

Streamlining onboarding

  • Lauren - Is there anything we can do to help the new committee members figure out what’s going on?
  • Tom - having a Committee Trello board would be great – Toby & Ryan - seconded
  • Toby - “by this time you should’ve received access to Basecamp” - Lauren: we will need to remove that, we don’t use Basecamp.
  • Anton - expected an invite to Google Drive, but didn’t receive one.
  • Lauren - Will double check access on Google
  • Toby - liked an onboarding process: “these are the things you should’ve known/done/talked about in the first day/week/month” - Things like researching what’s going on in the committee, and what needs help.

Long term goals for the year

  • Streamlining onboarding
  • Membership database
  • Communicate better with members
  • Refining the yearly sponsorship
  • Getting more sponsorship
  • Streamline running events through documentation and previous organisers
  • Code of Conduct

RubyConf AU 2018 + Sponsorship

  • Jo - we need to get organisers discussing RubyConf AU 2018.
  • Jo & Rachelle - Re-interactive wanted to offer small sponsorship for just InstallFest, rather than the Ruby Australia organisation as a whole.
  • Jo - Talked to Cogent (Opal sponsor) about livestreaming conferences.
  • Jo - First step is to get the conference organised.
  • Jo, Toby & Rachelle to work on getting sponsorship.
  • Tom - keen to help out with getting smaller sponsorships for Ruby Australia.
  • Jo - sponsorship takes a lot of time, spent on phone, in-person meetings, etc.
  • Jo - We need 150k-200k in sponsorship money for the year.
  • Jo - Over the next two months figure out who we can get to run the next RubyConf.

What do we store where? - Ana

  • Ana - What do we have on GitHub?
  • Lauren - the Ruby Australia website and camp guides.
  • Ana - anywhere else?
  • Ryan - Google Drive

End of 2017 RailsCamp

  • Toby - Lauren: John Dalton wanted to organise a camp in Tasmania. Does he still want to do it?
  • Lauren - If not, you (Toby) said you wanted to run one in Melbourne.
  • Toby volunteered himself for running the end of 2017 RailsCamp… if John Dalton didn’t want to run one.

Financial data

  • Anton - Do we have our financial data public anywhere?
  • Jo - Talked to accountants, we are not obliged to publish this data anywhere. Nobody has looked at this data since we last published. Public has right to know if we’re about to run out of money, but the accountants advice overall is to “not make it too public”. We can have a “Profit and Loss” report from Xero if we really wanted to.
  • Jo - It’s a bit of effort to get it published.
  • Ryan - If nobody’s accessing it, why publish it?
  • Jo - P&L for specific events may be helpful.

Action items

  • Lauren to have shared 1Password vault/Slack/Google account access with Ryan (Lauren)
  • Trello team setup, boards created (Lauren)
  • Did we remove past committee members from 1pw/slack/google? (Lauren)
  • Checkin on Mitchell (TwoRedKites) progress on membership database. (Tom)
  • RailsCamp inventoring progress (Tom & Rob Jacoby)
  • Checkin on bank card re-issuing progress (Jo & Ryan)
  • Annual statements - Did the accountants handle this yet? (Jo & Ryan)
  • Will we close rails-oceania and move it to a forum system (i.e. Discourse) (Anton)
  • Onboarding documentation project (Anton)
  • Porting the Constitution to Markdown (Anton)
  • Sponsorship plans for the new year (Jo)
  • Did we find RubyConf AU 2018 hosts yet? (Jo)
  • End of 2017 RailsCamp hosting - Tasmania or Melbourne? (Toby)

Finish: 8:24pm.