Ruby AU March Meeting Agenda
Start: 7:35pm, 21st March
Attending:
- Ryan Bigg (RB)
- Lauren Hennessy (LH)
- Jo Cranford (JC)
- Tom Ridge (TR)
- Toby Nieboer (TN)
- Anton Katunin (AK)
- Ana Djordjevic (AD)
Apologies:
- Rachel LeQuesne (RL)
RubyConf AU 2018 (Tom / Toby)
- TN: Talked with lookahead about whether where the conference was hosted mattered to their sponsorship / volunteering.
Sydney vs Melbourne for conference hosting
-
JC: We’ve been sharing a survey with interested companies to gauge if there’s a preference in hosting it.
-
LH: We can move the decision of deciding where to host the conference up to Nick and Mel.
-
JC: Who will give this info to Nick & Mel? LH: Rachelle will do it.
-
Rachelle / Lauren to pass information to Nick & Mel.
RubyConf storage location (Jo / Ryan)
- RB: Where can I get more information on what needs storing?
- JC: There’s a couple of small plastic boxes for RubyConf, not sure with regard to RailsCamp. There’s also more T-Shirts.
Actions:
- Ryan to investigate storage locations in Melbourne
RailsCamp inventory progress (Tom)
- TR: No progress has been made yet.
Actions:
- Tom will follow up with Rob. Should report back around the 29th of March.
Darwin RailsCamp update (Tom)
- TR: There are still cabin tickets left. There might be a last minute push for those. The buses should be organised. Everything should be coming together now.
Responsible Service of Alcohol (Tom)
- TR: What are our legal obligations with regard to to RSA?
- LH: RSA differs from state to state. We should link to the relevant states’ information from the Rails Camp guides. There’s a bunch of information on states’ websites and there are some phone lines you can call.
Actions:
- Tom will chase up this information.
Melbourne RailsCamp 2017 update (Toby)
- TN: Not much to update. Mel’s been talking to Hooroo about getting some time away to look at venues, with the intention of offering in-kind sponsorship. Hopefully we’ll be doing some visits soon and narrowing it down.
Ruby.org.au feature progress (Tom)
- TR: Members can now edit their profile + they can make it public / private. There’s a meetup page, and a way for admins to view all profiles. I’ll continue working on the admin dashboard and look at importing the old membership data using a CSV importer.
Ruby.org.au styleguide (Tom)
- TR: Ed Tippett and I have been working together on a Ruby styleguide for the website, enforced by Rubocop.
Ruby.org.au: hiring a designer (Richie Khoo?) (Lauren)
- LH: We have a meeting with Richie scheduled tomorrow (22nd) about Richie taking on some design work.
- RB: What kind of designs will Richie be doing?
- LH: We’ll need to talk to Richie first. Sprucing it up would be nice. There’s a couple of not-quite-perfect issues which have built up over time.
- RB: The right-side of the “U” of “AU” has been cut off. Can we get that fixed?
- LH: We have the source files to our own logo now. We can totally do that.
Actions:
- LH & TR to report back about the meeting when they have the info.
Welcome Guide documentation (Anton)
Financial statements (Ryan / Jo)
- RB: Got a call from CAV, they seemed mad. Going to look at this with Jo later this week.
- JC: Let’s find a time.
Actions:
- Ryan and Jo to look at this on Monday (27th March)
Bank card re-issuing (Jo / Lauren)
Actions:
- Lauren and Jo to look at this on Friday (24th March)
Sponsorship for next year (Jo)
- JC: Top-level sponsorships will remain the same. We’ve sent out our sponsorship survey to sponsors and Rachelle will handle the responses to that. Rachelle is handling all of the sponsorship info.
- LH: Is there something we can put out for expressions of interest from other companies?
- JC: We should put it on the forum and mention it at the meetups and on Slack.
- JC: We’ve been meaning to send out an email about RubyConf with the video links. We could add a bit there about sponsorship.
Actions:
- RubyConf information to be posted to the forum
Sandi Metz (Lauren)
- LH: Any news?
- JC: Got in contact with Susan (Sandi’s personal assistant), it’s going to be $120k for her to come over for two days. For 40 people, it’s $3,000 each for the three day course.
- RB: I wouldn’t pay $3k for that.
- JC: But I know of people who would pay for it. We could start up a kickstarter-like thing for it and maybe we could then fund it?
- AK: We could try it.
- TR: That’s a lot of effort for a total of 40 people. Is it cheaper if we do it at Rails Camp?
- LH: Nick and Mel were looking for info about whether she would come to speak at the conference. Kind of get her here for one thing, and then she can give the course after that. I feel like she might be too expensive for us.
- JC: Is it worth it for 40 people? I don’t know. I just realised that this is $120k USD. Should I ask if we can do it in May?
- TR: Would there be 20 people that would jump at it?
- RB: This sounds like it’s going to be too hard. Are we trying to cram too much in?
- JC: Yeah, you’re right. I’ll reply to Susan and tell her thanks for sending the info through. I’ll let her know that the organisers of the conference wish to invite her too.
Actions:
- Jo to follow up with Susan with essentially (thanks, but no thanks)
Continuity of committee roles (Jo)
- JC: Having continuity of roles has been really helpful, especially in regard to sponsorship.
- LH: Do you mean to have more overlap?
- JC: Yes. You join for a year and then (probably) leave. We should encourage people to stand again for re-election. This would be good to allow for work to continue, rather than this process of constantly handing over work and new people picking it up.
- TN: The way Ruby NZ runs their AGM and committee elections was great. Committee elections were moved as 1 year terms, and voting was done by voice vote. Having people say the amount of time they’d be willing to stand for would be good to announce at the AGM.
- LH: I like the idea of people staying for as long as they want to. I think if someone’s filling a position then it should be 6 months and then they can decide if they want to stay.
- JC: Who’s coming up for re-election?
- : Ana, Tom and Toby.
- LH: Tom was filling the position of VP after Lauren moved up to President.
- JC: I like the rotation, but I think that people just get stuck in and then they leave.
- AK: Having some documentation on what the committee does would be helpful.
- JC: Do we need to notify about an SGM and the elections?
- LH: Yes. We need to notify people about the elections and the new Constitution.
- JC: Can I nominate Ana, Tom and Toby again for re-election?
- Ana, Tom, Toby: Yes.
- TR: I don’t feel like I’ve been as supportive as I could be as VP. That’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ll be checking in with Lauren regarding how I’ve been tracking. I want to be meeting the standard I set for myself.
Actions:
- Ryan to go back through the minutes and see which roles should be up for re-election.
- Lauren to write up a post about the SGM / elections / Constitution.
Checklists / responsibilities for meetup sponsorship (Anton)
- AK: We should ensure meetups do thank their sponsors during the meeutp.
- TN: Each meetup has different ways of doing things / different cultures. I think when you’re asking companies to throw around five-figures then they’re entitled to a preference of how they’re presented; giving them the respect that they’re due.
- LH: This is the kind of thing that was mentioned by another sponsor. It’s something that we need to be more on-the-ball-with.
- AK: Anyone want to take this on?
- TN: I think Melbourne + Sydney meetup hosts should chat with the Committee about the proper way to mention sponsors. Sponsors have requested some consistency, let’s find out the best way to do it.
Actions:
- Documentation team to follow up on this
Should we remove old links from ruby.org.au? (Anton)
- AK: We should remove IRC, Wiki, Mentoring and the mailing list links from the sidebar of ruby.org.au.
- RB: Yes, we should remove them all.
- TN: Not the mailing list. I was contacted by a senior Rubyist within the community who had concerns with the mailing list being nuked. It should remain.
- LH: I agree, we should keep the mailing list link.
Actions:
- Anton to remove the links to IRC, Wiki and Mentoring
Forum team update (Anton)
- AK: The forum is launched!
Discourse people gave us Discourse for free because the Australian Ruby community has given them tons of support. Pretty great! - AK: The goal is to grow the popularity of the forum. We should move the event discussion to the forum. We should try to move / direct as much traffic there as possible. We should mention the Committee Meeting minutes there too.
Docs team update (Anton)
- AK: We got access to the original Base Camp account and we may be able to get some information from the archives there.
- AK: Rachelle is moving to sponsorship, so I’ll be getting move volunteers from the general public. I’ll try lead this team of volunteers on documenting Ruby AU.
End: 8:32pm