Attendees:
- Ryan Bigg (RB)
- Nick Wolf (NW)
- Caitlin Palmer-Bright (CP)
- Lachlan Hardy (LH)
- Toby Nieboer (TN)
Apologies:
- Namibia Lebron-Torres (NT)
- Ana Djordjevic (AD)
RFC Proposal
T:
I’ve asked Nick to invite Anton to this chat to discuss his proposal
T:
Welcome to Anton, he’s here to discuss his RFC proposal. What do you see as the major benefit?
Anton: I think it gives us more visiblity on what the committee is working on. It will connect the community with the committee. When anyone can submit it allows people to submit their ideas.
T: I see it suggests being submitted for ‘key’ committee decisions. How would you decide what counts?
Anton: That’s definitely still to be decided, we have the rule that any spending below a certain amount can be approved by the committee, because otherwise it would delay decisions, so we can set something similar for the RFC, so either it affects significant portion of the community or it will take a couple of months to do. This would capture anything with a large effect or that takes a long time. You can then adjust the threshold based on how the committee feels those levels are going.
T: Did this arise because a situation would have been improved if we had it, or just future proofing?
Anton: I think it would be future proofing. It’s a way to express things that warrant explaining. It lays out what the change is and what would be the benefits and disadvantages.
T: Any questions for the committee?
C: I guess my first thought is there is little reponsiveness in the forum, it’s mainly from the slack channels, and if they’re on the slack channel they’re going to see the minutes anyway. I just have concerns that it could be a lot of friction without much benefit, just a little extra extra involvement from a few community members. It’s something we can trial, but my gut instinct is that it’s not going to have much impact.
Anton: So I think it should only be for significant changes, rather than smaller changes that I think you’re referring to.
R: In the past we’ve brought significant changes to the SGM and AGM for a vote and the community seems to be silently agreeing to our changes.
T: Thoughts on Antons’ suggestion?
R: I like it for the paper trail, I have concerns it would cause more overhead for the committee, but I think the paper trail benefit wins out overall.
T: As long as we define the threshold properly, I don’t want people to feel it’s a very complicated process to suggest ideas to the committee. I don’t want this to be the only way to interact with the committee. I do think above a certain size it makes sense to request a level of detail from people suggesting ideas.
N: I’m certainly keen to have new ways for people to suggest ideas to the committee.
L: I think we can add it to the list of ways people can contribute to the community.
T: what do we think about the suggestion that all things above a certain level need to be submitted via RFC?
C: I think the several months concept feels like it could encompass most things that the committee handles simply because of the number of things that happen in life.
L: I think we can always post date things if they turn out to be a big deal.
Toby: So do we add it as another option and add that the committee may at its discretion require RFCs for certain proposals, such as submitting requests for new sponsorships of events.
L: I agree, anything that this committee does should have a case made for it, so that the committee can add, or comment or challenge and provide insight.
Grants
T: Namibia is an apology so we don’t currently have a update on grants or code of conduct. Nick can you give me an action to get the pull request completed for the code of conduct.
Sponorship
Rachelle: I’ve completed the new prospectus and send out to the existing sponsors a few days ago and I’m waiting to hear back from them.
I’m also sending it to a number of people who were interested in sponsoring RubyConf.
T: Do you want to cover the major changes?
R: Yes, we have 3 Ruby Sponsorship spots, 5 Emerald, Emerald no longer have the social activity naming rights, also the amount for Emerald went up to 25k.
R: I’ve also removed some of the tickets from the lower sponsorship spots as we had a number of sponsors signing up just before RubyConf just for the sake of getting the tickets which impacted the conference organizers.
R: Also, we need to keep in mind that if more sponsors sign up we should provide more money to the conf organisers
C: And for camps as well.
T: My idea on this is a set value per sponsors so each new sponsor increases the funding provided to camps and confs, just to make it a linear relationship.
T: There is definitely an argument to be made that we can provide more support to organisers.
R: Yes, I felt that and I was the main go between.
Events
C: Ticket Sales for Camp have official closed, I’ve still had a number of people sneak in diversity applications. At the moment I’m sitting on a small profit.
C: We officially closed at 55, but we’ll probably hit 60.
Documentation
L: I couldn’t make a GitHub pages on Pats page, so I forked Pats repo back into Ruby Australia and then I pressed the various settings and now we have a Jekyll site with all the markdown pages which all works.
L: Related to that we’ve talked about putting it on a subdomain so I checked 1password and don’t have access to the DNS details.
N: Yes, I have access to those.
L: So I quickly made a little project in GH to use GH projects and I’m going to add things like ‘set up DNS’ and ‘consolidate the stuff in forums into repos’, we can also things about themes.
L: Nick, can we have an action for us to set up the domain.
L: I also have a meeting with Anton next week to discuss documentation as well.
T: Thanks for that Lachlan, looks great.
Governance
N: So we have 3 committee positions coming up at the next rails camp
T: We have another meeting before then, but first off, who is going to RailsCamp?
Caitlin, Toby, Nick. Lachlan.
R: I’ll come out for the day.
T: So the terms coming up are Vice, 6 months and 12 months general member.
T: Normally I’ve seen the people who are interested in positions get spoken to at camp, so far I haven’t seen anyone speaking about it weeks before. We should think about who has reached out to us in the past to express interest.
N: Last camp we have 5 nominations for the general member.
Obviously we should talk about this at RoRos. Anyone that has had good ideas in the past?
N: Just in terms of the governance they did at SYN, are there any good people that aren’t Melbourne people that we can think about?
C; Yeah, at this point if I don’t run again, we only have 1 non Melbourne person on the committee.
T: on that point, what percentage of attendees are from Melbourne?
C: Reasonable high. I don’t know everyone. There are probably 15-20 who aren’t catching the bus.
T: Can I suggest Caitlin that can think about who might be good to reach out to in Brisbane
N: Is there someone in Sydney we can reach out to as well?
T: Yeah, we can mention it and also the Perth people. Make that an action for me to contact local organisers to find out about possible committee members.
Conf
T: Not really much to report on this. We have 4 (Toby, Caitlin, Ana, Sharon) of us on the organising committee at this time. We are at the point of targeting a range of dates. We’re casting a wide net on possible venues. If anyone knows anyone else who’s keen let me know, I’d like to get 6 on the organising committee for the conf.
Survey on why people attend
L: A number of people talked about asking the community on what they want, do they attend railscamp, which was the last one, why do you go, what do you enjoy about it? do you pay for it or does your company? Perhaps for each of our events. I think some form of survey for people to respond to might help us with a number of things this committee wants better insight on.
T: Plus, if we did it year on year, we can start comparing results.
L: Plus, we would only get results from those are keen to reply.
N: I’m really on board with this, 1 getting idea who the community is, 2 using that to figure out what they want to see in Ruby Australia and 3 asking can we you into our database so we can keep you informed.
T: 100 percent agree.
Meetup Reimbursement
R: I was approached by Adelaide RORO organiser about the fees for Meetup.com
T: They should be able to download an invoice form Meetup.com and send it to Ryan and we’ll pay it.
N: It occurs to me that meetup.com allows you to get 3 groups when you sign up so it might actually make sense for us to get a Ruby Australia Meetup account that owns all of the events and makes each of the orgs an administrator on the various groups.
RailsCamp 24
T: I’d really like 24 to be in Tasmania. That requires someone to be there or someone to do it remote. Do we have any suggestions on who we could approach?
C: Being honest, I’d do another one if someone is happy to look at venues and be a delivery point for swag. It was not as horrible as I expected.
N: Am I putting that in the minutes? Not as horrible as I expected?
T: Yes, that’s the headline to organising Railscamp.
C: It’s really not that big a deal, it’s just about swag, coffee, venue, food. The venue organises the vast majority of it.
T: Okay, fine, Caitlin and I are doing RailsCamp 24.
N: And reaching out for Tasmania help.
T: Yes.
New items
ACNC
I spoke to ACNC who directed me to the ATO who then directed me back to ACNC who talked me through what would be involved in getting us charitable status, First we would need to specify our charitable endevours, the closest would be Education. The other thing is we would need to specify in our constitution is who would receive our funds if we closed down, and finally the ACNC is only currently endorsing charities that provide health or homeless support services. We can look at applying separately via the ATO under the educational branch, but it appears it would require significant constitutional changes to get this done. I’ll just need to speak to the ATO again to see if we need to do anything special to accept money from people.
T: Thanks for going through all that.
Meeting Closed.