december.md

Ruby Australia Committee Meeting - December 20th 2016

Welcome new members

Actions from last meeting

• Check in on Ed's progress on the membership database
• Talk about AGM resolutions (bank card / constitution / committee stacking)
• Post-RailsCamp update
• Was the RailsCamp inventory tracked?
• Did we find a volunteer for the developer survey?
• How did we go with adding articles to the app?

New Items

• Bank Card resolution - Secretary + Treasurer to have access to bank card details + reissue the card in the organisation's name.
• Annual statements for 2013, 2014 and 2015 - Ryan
• Permissions on Slack, Google & 1Password - Lauren
• Streamlining onboarding process - Lauren
• Goals for the coming year - Lauren
• Membership database - Tom
• Communication & Infrastructure - Andre

• welcome new members
• offer for help on membership db.

Discussion on permissions/admin accounts for Slack, Google and 1password. Who should have access to what? Do we wish to leave some access with trusted members of the membership who aren't on the committee?

Onbaording: How can we streamline this? Trello board or checklist possibly? Who's job should it be to facilitate? What exactly needs to be done (suggest that we record any pain points of this turnover and work on them for the next)

Bank card: who do we want on the bank accounts? What needs to be done to achieve this?

Discussion of goals for the coming year. Breakdown into short, medium and long term and set some measurable outcomes and actionables.

Developers survey -- hold off until membership db sorted?

My proposed goal for the term: Communication and Infrastructure.

Why?

My original goal for the term (as Lauren knows) was to restructure Ruby Australia to minimise operational overhead and increase community involvement. No matter how much I want it to happen it is doomed to fail, as there are missing fundamentals. I want to run while we are still crawling.

I want to focus during my term on providing infrastructure for the community. In my opinion the core of our community is communication and I'd like to focus solely on that. This is an ongoing problem which I was observing for years.

Good communication is the base of any community. It is the glue which holds everything in place and doesn't allow to fall apart.

Unfortunately communication in a community suffers from diffusion of responsibility. It's everybody's responsibility and as a result it's nobody's responsibility.

That's why I believe RubyAU should take leadership on improving communication within organisation and the community as a whole.

"Communication" might not sound as obvious goal for RubyAU, but with all my experience and knowledge I can't think of anything more important than it.

"Communication" is a big project but to give you some perspective, there are three parts to it: ref

1. platform for discussion
2. storage for documentation
3. real-time communication

Why should you trust me?

• I've started learning about communication at Uni
• I've spend over 1 year writing application for multithreaded discussions
• I'm actively involved in Australian Ruby community for over 5 years and saw RubyAU evolve from its first days
• I've started Brisbane slack group and migrated 50+ people from skype group. Currently there are 220 people
• I've co-hosted BrisJelly meetup for 2+ years, which became 3 times more popular after implemented changes
• I'm great in writing long comments :D

• tying in with Anton's stuff above, what do we need assistance with, and what do committee members want to assist with/new suggestions.