Using funds from previous year on Ruby Community in SG

[TayKangSheng]

How can we use the fund to grow our RubySG Community this year?

Listing down the suggestions for discussions:

1. Sponsor Open Source Work
2. Sponsor RubySG Meetups
3. Giving limited edition 2020 RubySG Meetup Merchandise for speakers

[lyqht]

For merchandise, how about a voucher for a Ruby course + a RubySG swag sticker? 😃 I can design the sticker if you guys are keen. I think for current remote working situations, both will be nice.

[TayKangSheng]

@lyqht do you have any examples for vouchers of ruby courses? Definitely sound like a good idea, but not sure how it’ll turn out when we have ruby devs of varying experience.

[lyqht]

hii, i think there are many ruby courses out there and definitely if you're buying them in bulk, it won't be able to cater to everyone. So it depends on the target audience you're trying to attract to grow the community. Is it more advanced Ruby developers or developers from other fields (beginners to Ruby)? Rails related courses will be pretty interesting too.

Will be good if the Ruby course is more related to the event that they participate in as well! e.g. GDG Intro to Flutter event gave Flutter Bootcamp course voucher to the participants.

[TayKangSheng]

Tbh I am not sure about how experience are the Devs in our community right now. The target audience is definitely all of our community, both beginners and experienced. Maybe we can start with finding out some examples and ping in the telegram group to see whether people will be interested.

I definitely I want to avoid the case where people will only speak because they will be given something. I believe it will encourage a culture different from a culture that I want to encourage. The kind of culture I want to encourage is to create an inclusive place for people to share their ideas and learn from each other. From here, hopefully people can feel safe to talk about their learnings no matter how simple they are. Speaking to HuiJing from SingaporeCSS, she mentioned that how reactknowledgeable does it is to give special edition stickers only for speakers. The idea is trivial but I think trivial might be key here. Something that will not encourage a wrong culture.

Since this is under the topic of Giving limited edition 2020 RubySG Meetup Merchandise for speakers, I wonder whether its attractive enough for people to speak without encouraging the anti-pattern for our meetup.

@winston what do you think about this? I might consider just dropping this idea of giving out stuff for speaking all together. This culture if set likely requires enormous effort to undo.

Sponsor RubySG Meetups

I gave this topic some thought, and I think I'll prefer keeping the RubySG meetup online for as long as possible. With that being said, I also don't want people to not know each other, so I'm thinking maybe we can have a physical meetup (no talks, pure social) once every 6 months. The expenses for the meetup can be from the fund.

For example:

• We can consider doing a combine event with HackerDrinks and we can sponsor the beers + beverages. In my opinion, the plus point of doing a combined event with someone else are
  1. they have the expertise to conduct such an event,
  2. letting our Devs expand their network and knowing more people and
  3. supporting other engineering community at the same time.

[winston]

what do you think about this? I might consider just dropping this idea of giving out stuff for speaking all together. This culture if set likely requires enormous effort to undo.

I believe it really depends on how you sell it, i.e. is it a badge of honour and a "wah I am better than you because I have this exclusive memorabilia from RubySG" or a "thank you for speaking, this is just a token of appreciation" kind of thing. If it's the latter, then our communications cannot be "if you want this, then come speak!" - it's just a nice to have.

so I'm thinking maybe we can have a physical meetup (no talks, pure social) once every 6 months

👍

i think there are many ruby courses out there and definitely if you're buying them in bulk, it won't be able to cater to everyone. So it depends on the target audience you're trying to attract to grow the community. Is it more advanced Ruby developers or developers from other fields (beginners to Ruby)? Rails related courses will be pretty interesting too.

Hmm.. This might be interesting. Maybe we can sponsor x% of the fees. And participants only need to pay Y-x% amount? But how do we build the element of community here? Get participants to write blog post to share?