Ruby Australia - Committee Meeting - 19th February 2019

19th February 2019
Attendees
• Caitlin Palmer-Bright
• Rachael Goodenough
• Patt Allan
• Ryan Bigg
• Sonya Corcoran
• Sharon Vaughan
• Matt Stevenson

1. Regular Business:
a. Finances (RB)
Ryan –Still crunching the numbers, however we’re not in debt!
Team - We love you Ryan!

b. Website (MS)
*Matt shows us the preview of the new website
Team - We loveeee!!
Mat – still working on it and it’s not quite working on mobile

Documentation
Pat – I think as a conference team, we will have a bit of a chat soon. Bit of a retro, and then we will update the conference guide.

Grants (SV)
Sharon – Every time I go to look, I come up with the same thing – nothing that is relevant for us. I did have some contact with Launch VIC but they cant help us. Seems to be the story everywhere we look.
Pat – If grants aren’t suiting, they aren’t suiting.
Sharon – They change regularly, Launch VIC could change their perimeters? Its always a good idea to keep an eye on them.
Pat – Maybe worth, putting a list together of who we have contacted?
Mat – is there any value looking at grants for hardware. Like getting extra laptops for RailGirls?
Caitlin – The issue is to get them places, and store them. We already have a whole kit. Who is taking it? I don’t think the value add would counteract the hassle to be in charge of moving them around.
Sharon – maybe cameras for meetups (conferences)?
Caitlin – I think its cool things we could eventually do, but the point at looking at grants to get more money for our core business. It’s a lot of effort to apply for it.
Sox – How about trytestlearn? It’s all about reskilling people, its national, it’s a govt grant for rural areas.

Action points - Sharon will take a look
Sox – how much more could Ruby Au do if we had a paid person?

o Sponsorship (SC)
Sox - Caught up with all and potential sponsors.
Ryan – Excited that we’re getting a bunch of new sponsors
Sox – I want to send out a thank you email and hit them up with a new prospectus. Can someone explain timeline and how it usually works? When do we need timelines?
Ryan – we try and get them lined up before the financial year, and get them signed up before June 30th. We’d like them to be confirmed before the financial year so we know what we’ll need for the next financial year.
Pat – feel free share to share the prospectus in the channel

o RubyConf AU (PA, CBP, SV)
i. 2019 –Pat Allan we were all there, we saw it. Yeah so, my very biased opinion was it was a great success. We’re still in the process of working out if it was a profit. That will be a learning process. Even if you run it in Melbourne it might not make a profit.
Ryan – I thought we would get more attendees being in Melbourne
Pat – That was a fair assumption.
Ryan – we did a great job Pat and everyone else involved. Felt energised.
Caitlin – Would be echoing your sentiments. I have a strong bias. I don’t have a frame of reference, I thought it was phenomenal. It will be good to see the actual feedback come in. I think I had one person who had anything negative about any of the talks and he only went to half of them. It was so great to see so many people there. A lot of very excellent humans
Sharon – Great conference, we did a great job!
Caitlin –I had so much fun that I don’t care if we get negative feedback!
Mat – Pat, you mentioned there were hiccoughs?
Caitlin – Our speaker who was having sponsorship issues, his visa arrived the next day
Pat – We asked for feedback - how likely are you to recommend the conference from a scale of 0 to 10, by far the response was in the 8 to 10 range, however the first feedback response was a two. Feedback in general, some people wanted more technical, some people liked the mix, some people wanted more local talent. Very much a whole mix of thoughts. In regards to me being too political, I wanted to know which bits they disagreed with.

ii. 2020 –Rails Camps (PA) Pat – There have been some ticket sales. Maybe ill do a follow up tweet? EOI next rails camp, Are we still going to run a camp every 6 months? At the last general meeting we asked if we wanted to do it, and consensus that it shouldn’t matter if the numbers are low. We want to make sure events are happening around the country.

iii. Rails Girls (SV) – its happening. Trying to get over ruby conf. I’ve tabled for early April. Rob is so quick at getting it organised. Date is in the envato calendar. I think I gave sox the date. April 13th?
Sox – Sydney is going to run one on the same date. And I managed to convince someone else to do it. Spoke to Angie, as they didn’t run one in Sydney for the last 12 month. Talking about a rotation model. Going to host it at google

2. Irregular Business
#aabill Pat – So has you may have seen, slack and twitter, I sent off and wrote a letter, and we got signatures at the conference which was great. I’m sure plenty of people wanted to sign it. I sent it off to any shadow minister that might be relevant. PM/ opposition leader.

a. 2019/2020 Sponsorship = Sox putting together prospectus

b. RubyConf AU 2020 Expressions of Interest -

  • Rachael Goodenough (Readify) has emailed.
  • Ben Evans (Zendesk) has emailed.
  • Elizabeth Enders (Envato) (mentioned to SV)
  • Sophie McDonald (Inlogik) (mentioned to PA)
  • Sirani McNeill (mentioned to PA)

c. Community Survey
Caitlin and Mat – Community survey. Get on to that straight after the conference, we haven’t set the date to do the date planning on that.
Mat – sounds good
Caitlin – We will create a draft for feedback, send out before then.
Caitlin –No problem with a little gap between conference to community feedback

d. Email to Ruby AU Members

  1. Pat – No point doing that until the survey is ready.
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