Ruby Australia - Committee Meeting - 21st August 2018
Attendees:
- Matt Stevenson (MS)
- Nick Wolf (NW)
- Toby Nieboer (TN)
- Ryan Bigg (RB)
- Rochelle LeQuesne (RL)
Apologies:
- Caitlin Palmer-Bright (CP)
- Sharon Vaughan (SV)
- Lachlan Hardy (LH)
Grants (Sharon)
NW: No updates at this time.
Sponsorship update (Rachelle)
RL: Very little to update at this time. I sent the links for the Railscamp tickets to sponsors so they can sort our their sponsorship tickets. one company reached out to cash them in as Conf tickets instead. That’s it from Sponsors.
Website redesign (Matt)
MS: Nothing much on new developments. Is everyone okay if I go through the backlog of pull requests and either merge or resolve those?
RB: I can see some Ruby and Rails updates, I think they’re all good for you to make decisions on.
MS: Are there any particular goals we’re hoping to achieve from the website?
TN: Aspirationally something that modernizes the website and provides a fairly intuitive path for newcomers to Ruby.
Events (Lachlan)
NW: No updates
Documentation (Toby/Lachlan)
TN: No updates for now.
RubyConf 2019 (Caitlin/Sharon/Toby)
TN: Having already locked in dates and location we’re now working on inviting speakers. We’re aiming to have 4 to 8 International speakers. I believe we have 3 or 4 acceptances at the moment. We’re discussing how to run the CFP and sorting out ticket pricing. Caitlin is looking after the budget and we’re aiming to have them inline with last year or hopefully slightly cheaper.
TN: We got back the first drafts of some logos we asked for just a few hours ago. Hopefully once that goes public it will start to drive some more hype.
Survey on why people attend (Lachlan)
NW: No updates
RailsCamp 24 (Caitlin/Toby)
TN: Tickets are on sale, we’ve already sold double digits, things are looking good, the budget looks good provided we meet our minimum. We’re just sorting out which coffee cart to get and our swag order is going though late October.
TN: We’ve been able to provide a number of diversity tickets which are completely free and we’ve made it possible for people to contribute towards diversity tickets when purchasing their ticket with a suggested amount of $30 and that’s given us enough for another half a person.
Memberships (Nick)
NW: I haven’t had a chance to meet with Lachlan on this one, so I’m going to collate everyone’s previous ideas and put those in the slack for review.
New RailsGirls Melbourne
TN: Last discussion I had with Sharon was that October would be a better choice. Rachelle have we given you a date yet?
RL: Not yet.
TN: We’re aiming to have it before October RoRo so we can convince some attendees to come to RoRo.
Call for new items
RB: Rachelle are we likely to get more sponsorship for RubyConf?
RL: Nothing else on the radar other than potentially one company in October.
TN: We haven’t heard anything back from that other company yet, so it’s not a no, but it’s looking increasingly unlikley.
TN: We may have to think about having a paid sponsorship role.
NW: What would be the first steps of setting that up?
RL: Anton was speaking to Liam for ideas about it.
TN: Liam provided some expertise and thoughts on how it could work. If we do this, then the committee doesn’t have to worry about this. The Downsides are that we’ve been doing really well in the past thanks to the amazing efforts of Rachelle and paying someone for something we’ve been doing for free is challenging. I also think the lead time to set up something like this is also prohibitive. That said Sponsorship isn’t where we’d like it to be so worth reintroducing.
NW: I would be curious to see how it would change after RubyConf gets closer. Did we want to review it in a future meeting?
RB: If we do hire someone, do we have a list of companies we’ve contacted and their replies?
RL: I’ve got a list of people I’ve contacted but they often don’t ever reply if it’s a no.
RB: Lets think on it and review later.