2019 11 03 Committee meeting
Ruby New Zealand Incorporated
11.00am - 3.00pm
Table of Contents
- 2019-11-03 Committee Meeting Minutes
Present:
- Mathew
- Laura
- Andrew
- Rebecca
- Pete
- Anthony
- Steve
- Merrin
Opened: 11.23am
Minutes:
- Discussing setup for this meeting
- This is half-way point for this committee term
- We should consider that the next AGM could be at the next Ruby Retreat; there are generally more participants when there is an in-person event. Discuss further in ‘looking forward’ section.
- Review of timeline of events this year.
- Kiwi Ruby organisation began
- AGM/Election
- First Meeting (April)
- Started releasing minutes
- Regular monthly meetings
- Created community subcommittee, strategy subcommittee
- May
- Created Strategic Vision
- Did SWOT analysis
- Published results of community survey
- June
- Discussed speaking with recruiters (as part of strategic vision)
- Discussed how to improve community in Auckland
- Discussed Rails Bridge
- Started #open-source channel
- July
- Started talking around compensation for event organisers
- Talked about Rails Camp
- Decided to introduce ‘welcome’ bot / automations
- August
- Compensation guidelines recap
- Discussed AGMs
- September
- Compensation guidelines recap + publicization
- Organised to meet at Kiwi Ruby (now!)
- Introduced the monthly newsletter
- Discussed outreach at events like Welly Tech
- October
- Recapped Newsletter
- Kiwi Ruby updates
- Moderation event
- Kiwi Ruby!
- Point to discuss how to spend surplus from events
- Potential to use money to have larger events in each city. To discuss further
-
Timeline/Retrospective continued..
- Retrospective exercise. Writing notes into categories of Good/Bad/Improve (See addendum #1)
Break for lunch: 12.10pm - 12.40pm
Minutes Cont.
-
Members placed two dots each on retrospective items to discuss further
- What do we do with ‘the money’?
- We have more money than needed for yearly administration. All events seem to make a surplus. It is unclear how to use this money - e.g. subsidise events? Give more money to railsbridge who may not need it? Give to meetups? Something else?
- Merrin likes the idea of more outreach in university communities - perhaps this could happen through partnerships with organisations like summer of tech
- We have lots of good ideas of how to spend the money, but it is a matter of how to spend it - perhaps through formalised proposals.
- Merrin would propose giving money to organisation to do a ruby event / sponsor a student (e.g. Summer of Tech, Catalyst Code, Summer of Code).
- Doesn’t have to be entirely sponsored by us - this could entail large spending (number of $15,000 roughly floated as cost of providing an internship). Making a proposal which we take to the community / public could make for good discourse on funding these sorts of events.
- If we’re spending money, we want to be sure of what it’s going towards / what our goals are.
- Discussed / reviewed our 2020 vision goals
-
Sponsorship discussion cont..
- Callaghan Innovation provides a program to subsidise internships.
- Could support railsbridge in collaboration with Summer of Tech as they have workshops around a variety of dev skills. There are a lot of partnership opportunities. They also have a presence in Auckland
-
Actions / Points for further discussion:
- Outreach
- Partnership with Summer of Tech/etc. Ruby Summer of Code.
- Ruby together
- Grants
- Community building
- Christmas parties, events, meetup funding
- Outreach
- How can we encourage more meetups?
- Meetups in Auckland are a little bit slow. People are not attending, and it is difficult to find people talk. Some events are cancelled, and the latest was a remote hackathon.
- Miscommunication - recruiters don’t appear to think there are many Ruby developers, and developers don’t know of the ruby companies
- Problems to solve:
- Finding the companies, finding the people
- Making the events well known
- Regarding lack of talks, in Christchurch the strategy they use is to make a poll of all the event months where people are asked to commit to a particular date (without a topic) which tends to fill out the entire year. (Tool used is Doodle polls).
- How do you get new people to talk
- How do you get a diverse range of people?
- You need to know about the poll, and also be comfortable to put your hand up
- There are always 1-2 talks, and generally there is space for extras.
- Christchurch also runs an event where students turn up to learn and do ruby for an evening.
- Three other things Christchurch do to make successful events
- Dinner before the event
- Difficult for Auckland with spread of people
- Ruby Burgers: Half way between meetups, people come along for lunch
- Regular time and place
- Auckland doesn’t have a consistent venue due to availability, parking, so on.
- Ruby NZ could sponsor a venue to try help solve this problem
- Dinner before the event
- More focused events like mob coding on open source issues could be good
- We can sponsor code golf events
- We can take successful, repeatable events and spread them to other meetups to try bolster them.
-
Actions / Ideas
- Get list of Auckland companies
- Create an outreach program, put up posters to get in touch with people working there
- Outreach to student immigrants - could be as simple as flyers, or going to the universities
- Tangentially, set up the talks website again
- Goal to run one event in each of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch universities next year.
- Meetups in Auckland are a little bit slow. People are not attending, and it is difficult to find people talk. Some events are cancelled, and the latest was a remote hackathon.
- What do we do with ‘the money’?
Drink Break 1.26pm - 1.33pm
Minutes Cont.
- Setting targets for AGM (specific, actionable, owned) / Lacking big goals
- We have a strategic vision, but the goals are not perfectly quantifiable - they are subjective goals. How do we measure our performance?
- How do we get feedback that we’re doing the right thing?
- A case of wanting to do more things, but not knowing what exactly to do.
- Need to define how we measure success
- Need to define actions that we can take individually to be more active in the committee and community
- Exercise to see how we collectively think we’re measuring up against the 2020 vision (See Addendum #2)
- Action: Do this again in 6 months
- Action: Graph value, realism / ability to change and how much it changes
- Exercise to estimate/score achievability and value of each point (See addendum #3)
-
Additional Actions/Ideas:
-
Potential to motivate people to participate as speakers and writing blogs by giving out t-shirts.
-
Perhaps combined RSS feed? [Merrin]
-
Get involved in Tech week at universities in May
-
Make a public speaking channel to coach
-
Tenuously, thinking about dev exchanges/secondments between companies with regards to advancing people skills.
-
Get ruby/rails companies listing updated
- Outreach to those companies
- Questions required
- Survey, so we can graph over a period of time
- Offer opportunities with companies, share our ideas and values.
- Come back to this? Understand the community and what we can do to help orgs using it.
- Outreach to those companies
-
Reschedule next committee meeting by Slack
-
Scrap subcommittees. The tasks we created them for are complete.
-
Closed: 3.00pm
- How to spend surplus money
- Partnership with Summer of Tech/etc. Ruby Summer of Code.
- Ruby together
- Grants
- Christmas parties, events, meetup funding
- How can we encourage more meetups?
- Ruby NZ could sponsor a venue to try help irregularities in Auckland meetups
- We can sponsor events like code golf
- Get list of Auckland companies
- Create an outreach program, put up posters to get in touch with people working there
- Outreach to student immigrants - could be as simple as flyers, or going to the universities
- Tangentially, set up the talks website again
- Goal to run one event in each of Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch universities next year.
- In 6 months, carry out (again) the exercise to see how we collectively think we’re measuring up against the 2020 vision
- Potential to motivate people to participate as speakers and writing blogs by giving out t-shirts. Perhaps combined RSS feed?
- Get involved in Tech week at universities in May
- Make a public speaking channel for coaching
- Tenuously, think about dev exchanges/secondments between companies with regards to advancing people skills.
- Get ruby/rails companies listing updated
- Outreach to those companies
- Questions required
- Survey, so we can graph over a period of time
- Offer opportunities with companies, share our ideas and values.
- Outreach to those companies
Retrospective Notes: Good/Bad/Change/Kudos
Good
- Kiwi Ruby went well, and went sustainably
- Strategy thinking
- One of the most functional committees
- Followed through on transparency
- Have a range of people on the committee (places, experience, etc)
- Newsletter
- No drama!
- Gender ratio positively commented on
- We have a record of things we aim/aimed to do
- Regular meetings with agendas and minutes
Bad
- Subcommittees languished a bit.
- Low engagement
- Feeling of not having enough time to do significant personal things
- We don’t have goals with specific targets
- Auckland meetings not consistent / low engagement
- What do we do with the money?!
- Had one focus of Kiwi Ruby
- Low interaction with rest of community
- Lacking big goals
Change
- Pay people for stuff
- Decide whether subcommittees are permanent or temporary
- Involve students & immigrants
- Newsletter is very manual
- Set targets for next AGM (things to do by then)
- Encourage ruby talks to be recorded / written up
- Try create a speaker trade with ruby conf etc
- Guide to the mechanics of running an event
- Perhaps change focus to be more general than ruby?
- Collaborating with Ruby AU in general
- Could try quarterly general meetings to involve community
- Bring back “RORO” (Ruby or Rails Oceania)
- Could transform newsletter into blog-post style which is published online as well as sent out as an email
- Clearer tasks for the committee to perform. This could take the form of a public task tracker similar to our private task tracker.
Kudos
- Kudos to Rebecca and Anthony for coming from Auckland and giving their input
- Kudos to Pete for bringing big picture when we are getting bogged down
- Kudos to Steve for starting the newsletter
- Kudos to Andrew for writing minutes for public
- Kudos to All involved in running Kiwi Ruby
- Kudos to Merrin for keeping us organised and bringing history, context & energy
- Kudos to Steve for paying the bills
- Kudos to moderators for keeping a tidy Slack
- Kudos to everyone for getting sh*t done
Initial assessment of how we measure against the 2020 vision
Presented in the format of the 2020 vision, with nested bullet points of our assessment. Assessment given in form of approximate average, and range of scores between 0 and 5 (inclusively)
What does this look like?
- We understand the pulse of the Ruby community, how Ruby is being used, and what we can do to help organisations continue to use it
- Approximately 2/5 1-3
- We have good partnerships with organisations that teach and use Ruby.
- Approximately 2/5 0-4
- We did get good sponsorship for Kiwi Ruby, but the relationships tend to be quite ad hoc.
- No relationships with universities
What does this look like?
- A wide variety of people share their knowledge with the community through talks, blog posts, and discussions.
- Approximately 2-3/5 1-3
- Not enough people talking at events
- There are people writing blogs
- People from the New Zealand community often contribute to big international projects and conferences.
- Approximately 2/5 0-4
- Very few people involved, and the number is likely decreasing
What does this look like?
- Meetups happen regularly in big cities, and sometimes happen in smaller centres.
- Approximately 3/5 2-4
- Christchurch is good. Wellington average. Auckland having events with low attendance. Hamilton having a meetup. WellRailed happens 5-6 times a year. Constrained by speakers
- We support events targeted at people learning to program, people who are considering career changes, and people underrepresented in our community.
- Approximately 1/5 1-5
- Rails bridge happens ~once a year. Kiwi Ruby diversity tickets.
- We support those events, but not many are run
- We have a plan and schedule for larger events.
- Approximately 2 1-3
- We just had a kiwi ruby. There is a ruby retreat being organised
- We support event organisers to share the load and draw on knowledge and expertise.
- Approximately 3/5 1-5
- We have expertise to draw on
- Better feeling about sustainability of our events than a year ago
- We have put up a page around funding/organising events with Ruby NZ
- Ruby NZ has been a safety net - do we need to take more of an active role, though? Perhaps discuss further
What does this look like?
- People who are new to discussions or events feel able to contribute and want to come back.
- Approximately 3/5 1-4
- It has improved, but it can still be an intimidating community, with a bit of an old guard.
- Some people aren’t that interested in contributing anyway.
- We do have channels such as #ask-away
- Our community has a more equal gender ratio compared to other open source communities in New Zealand.
- Approximately 4/5 3-5
- Doing much better than other communities
- Though, few female speakers at meetups - and when they do, they are usually always the same people.
- Our community welcomes people from many different cultural backgrounds, reflecting the diversity and cultural richness of Aotearoa New Zealand.
- Approximately 2/5 2-4
- We aren’t currently that diverse
- It is very hard to get your first job in IT as an immigrant.
- Ruby has a close tie to ‘startup town’, and is very network based which can be fairly racist/biased.
