Ruby Australia - Committee Meeting - 15th May 2018 Minutes

Attendees:

  • Ryan Bigg (RB)
  • Nick Wolf (NW)
  • Rachelle LeQuesne (RL)
  • Toby Nieboer (TN)

Apologies:

  • Caitlin Palmer-Bright (CP)
  • Lachlan Hardy (LH)
  • Namibia Lebron-Torres (NT)
  • Ana Djordjevic (AD)

Grants

T: Namibia has documented everything done so far and is ready to hand over to the new person

CoC

T: I’m yet to submit the pull request to get that updated

Sponsorship

RL: I’ve emailed the existing sponsorships, Lookahead have signed up, CultureAmp have emailed an enquiry to confirm some of the details, I’ve now emailed the people who’ve emailed since then. I’ve also had an email from another company.

T: That’s less people that I would have thought.

RL: This is basically what happened last year, with very little movement and then once RubyConf is on the horizon we get swamped with interest.

T: Maybe we need to announce Dates and Cities.

Events

NW: Caitlin provided an update in the Slack as an apology. Everything seems to be going well. She’s keen to intro an established policy around under 18s and refunds.

T: This came about because we had an 11 year old sign up and we didn’t realise they were the daughter of one of the attending developers.

T: I think as we copy our events from previous event templates and Caitlin has now added that in she’s more or less resolved that now.

T: Who’s going?

Nick, Toby, Lachlan, Caitlin, Ana

Documentation

T: I haven’t had a chance to work on this, but I know Lachlan has been working on this.

RubyConf2019

T: Lachlan and I went to a venue to get a price comparison for other places. They just got back to us with a quote.

N: Was it competitive?

T: I don’t have a point of comparison yet so I’m not sure.

T: We’re considering a few venues.

T: We don’t want to pick dates yet, we want to let the venues inform dates.

T: I think for sponsorship purposes it will be good if we can narrow it to a City and Month soon.

T: At the moment we have 4 people on board for the organising committee, and we’re talking to a possible fifth at RailsCamp.

Survey

Moving past as we have an apology for Lachlan for this meeting.

RailsCamp

T: We have a location (Tasmania) but not a venue and we have organizers.

N: And you were reaching out to a local dev in that area to look at venues.

T: We’re leaning towards the middle of Oct.

N: What’s the max number of people that can attend?

T: Up to 120.

N: Is it normal that there’s a smaller one then larger one?

T: No, it’s just a random quirk of the ones you’ve seen.

T: We’ll be announcing the camp location at the AGM and it will probably be closer to Launceston than Hobart.

RB: I think that’s close to where the last RailsCamp was. At Camp Banksia.

T: Audible Laugh

T: That’s exactly the one I’m looking at.

N: Well it’s a good sign if an entirely seperate group of organizers also decided that was the best venue.

T: Good point, we’ll have to look into what people thought of the venue.

SGM

T: We were going to have 2 general member and 1 Vice, but we now have one 6 month to see out Namibia’s term.

T: We generally most of our applications at the actual event.

N: I know that Caitlin also did a call out in the mailout with camp details.

T: I would like us to think about which people we’d like to approach.

T: Does anyone else have other suggestions?

N: i’ll post a list of all the camp attendees in the slack channel.

N: It would also be good to just to get a more diverse range of locations represented given we are 90% Melbourne.

ATO Single Donations for Members

N: I spoke to the ATO. We can accept donations/contributions but people can’t claim it on their taxes. they also provided suggested wording. If it’s a gift they can’t receive any material benefit equal to the value they’re giving.

Document 46262 on the ATO website.

T: so the fact that it’s seperate from the tax donation element means we don’t have to align it with financial year timelines.

N: So it wouldn’t effect the member but we’d want to report it on our taxes.

T: We could make it a membership that has an expiry 365 days later.

T: In order for this to work there needs to be a clear reason why people want to do it. Communicating Why is the next thing. Things such as Camp and Conf tickets early.

N: The examples are newsletter and periodical mentions, a lapel pin and a plaque of small prominence and nature.

T: Nick, now that we have this ironed out, I think the next step is figuring out what the offer should be to get people to take it up. If it can get us a bit of more revenue to contribute to RailsGirls then that’s great.

Treasurer’s Report.

T: Ryan, I’ll need your report for the SGM.

RB: I’ll get that to you shortly.

Call for new items.

RB: Commbank has created a new account after just 2 visits compared to 13 with Westpac. They also had great customer service.

RB: I’m going to try and make a meeting with the Westpac manager to discuss our experiences.

End of Meeting.