Hi committee members!
After speaking with most of you and thinking a lot about how the committee is structured and the problems we have with things like:
turnover and on boarding
committee meetings / communication as blocks for getting work done
members knowing what their job is at any given time and being able to access information and guidance they need
A lack of knowledge carryover from committee to committee
I realise we can’t solve all of this at once, but we need to keep iterating on what we have to smooth things out more and more. I think we’ve made really good progress in this last few months, especially as it’s been a short 1/2 term, but I believe we can do better still for the next few months. I have made a few decisions around this to trial till the next general meeting.
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We will have more defined roles for the general committee member roles. This will, I hope, empower members to own the tasks they are given and help people joining the committee to know what they are getting into. We have some ongoing roles which I expect to last for a while at the moment so I think it’s a good opportunity to try this model. If you are in a named role already, that’s unlikely to change, though some boundaries might be shifted slightly as we figure out what tasks fit into which roles. If you are an ongoing general member, you probably already have a role you’ve taken on. Look forward to more clarification and support for that role if you need it!
New roles will be:
Sponsor Liaison
Event Liaison
Website (ruby.org.au) Manager
Documentation (to hopefully be phased out as we get a handle on existing documentation)
I will work to flesh out the meanings of these roles in the coming days, I hope they are fairly self explanatory to you as committee members, but we need to be able to express them to the membership base, especially those who may be looking to join us. The open roles will be Website Manager and Event Liaison, with Rachelle handing sponsors and Anton handling documentation. I’m also aware that the time commitment for these might be poorly weighted, and that there will probably still be some sharing of roles, which is totally fine. The idea is to have a leader for each role, not for all of the work to necessarily be done by that person. -
For tools to track progress on goals we will use a combination of this forum, GitHub (where that is an appropriate tool for the project), and probably Trello. This will be decided for sure once we have the committee finalised. If people are unfamiliar with or have problems adopting Trello we can look at other options but for now I, and Toby who I expect to become VP at this point, believe it to be the best tool available.
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The President and Vice President roles will become more facilitatory, managing overall direction and ensuring that the roles are interacting well. We will shift boundaries and responsibilities when needed and allocate extra hands for crucial or time sensitive tasks. I’ll be looking for short updates (one or two paragraphs) on where things are at from each of the leads about once a fortnight, one before the committee meeting and one in the middle of each meeting. I hope to then use these to form updates to the membership about our progress.
Please feel free to comment on this and give me your two cents. If you think it can be improved on or if you think there are different things we should be trying I’m certainly open to that. Also if you think there are any roles I have missed which need to be included please let me know.
Short description of the roles as I see them:
Sponsor Liaison
The focus of this role is sourcing yearly sponsorships around the start of the financial year and maintaining good relationships with sponsors throughout the year. It will include making sure we are meeting all our sponsor commitments and tracking possible improvements for the next year of sponsorships. This is a big job and we expect to have more than one person on it for at least the initial sourcing of major sponsorships.
Event Liaison
This role is around making sure event organisers, both large and small, can access information and support they need from the committee. It will also involve ensuring that each event is meeting our sponsor commitments in terms of exposure and kudos.
Website (ruby.org.au) Manager
This will be something of a product manager / lead dev role focusing on the website and database. There are significant improvements to be made around managing profiles as well as a likely contract to spruce up the front end which will need to be managed. We hope for this to include bringing people in from the community for an open source feel.
Documentation (to hopefully be phased out as we get a handle on existing documentation)
This is around collating and managing documentation for use by future committee members and event organisers. It will involve refining existing documentation and taking sometimes disjointed new documentation (in the form of a forum thread or Trello card) and distilling it into the information worth keeping.