2026-05-26 Annual General Meeting Minutes

Agenda

Chairperson’s report on the business of the Society
Treasurer’s report on the finances of the Society, and the Annual Financial Statements
Discuss any matters arise from financial statements
Motion to accept previous minutes as true and accurate record
Election of Committee Members
General business
Thanks to retiring committee members
Thanks to event organisers

Attended by

Nick Malcolm, Philip Arndt, Michael Yin, Tim Ross, YiSheng Lee, Sampath Nisha, Alex Rupom, Ben Tillman, Jordan Crawford, Nathan Broadbent, Patrick Davey, Sarah Hay, Kirsten Comandich, Rob Ingram, Henry, Jonathan Arndt

Minutes

Opened 8:00pm

Opening

Quick opening note on the previous meeting had been adjourned due to lack of quorum on the original date of Sunday 10 May 2026. Therefore quorum was not required at this adjourned date. However, at 8:02PM a quorum of 14 people was reached.

Chairperson’s report

Nau mai haere mai, e hoa mā. Welcome friends!
I’m Nick, and for the last year I’ve been the chairperson of Ruby NZ. It was my first year on the committee and I’m glad to have been able to serve the community in this capacity. First and foremost thank you to you, our members, for your continued support of Ruby NZ, and thank you for attending tonight’s 2026 AGM.
As a reminder, the primary purposes of the Ruby NZ Society are to
Foster and support the Ruby programming language, its users, community and ecosystem in New Zealand.
Advocate for Open Source in general, and the Ruby programming language in particular.
Provide support for Ruby community events.
Work with event organisers to ensure the Ruby community and events in New Zealand are safe and welcoming.
Do anything necessary or helpful to the above purposes
This committee’s term began right after the Ruby Retreat in Auckland. Since then our activities have reflected our purposes, and it has been a straightforward year. (Hint: being on the committee is easy and you should be part of it!)
I’m very happy that we have been able to support our meetup organisers, when asked. They truly are what keeps this community going, they don’t ask a lot (if anything!) and they do good hard work. Concretely we paid the Meetup.com bill for one meetup, and we were able to offer a Christmas Koha to our organisers. I’m thankful too to the businesses that support our meetups through their sponsorship.
As I mentioned, this committee was after the last Ruby Retreat so we had some expenses to reimburse there. The committee also enacted the changes required to be compliant with the new Societies Act - namely switching member postal addresses for phone numbers in the members register.
As Philip our Treasurer will be able to attest in his report, Ruby NZ remains in a healthy financial position.
With regards to Ruby NZ society membership, this year we added 21 members and no members left, making a current membership of 127. This year has been the first full year sharing a Slack with Ruby Australia. The camaraderie and ability to interact with each other has been something I’ve enjoyed and I hope you have too. There are 234 people in the #announce-nz channel, and 2.6k in the #general channel.
I’d like to thank this year’s committee members: our secretary Michael, treasurer Philip, and Jonathan, Henry, Nathan, and Ben. We easily managed one conflict of interest - Jonathan and Philip are brothers, so Jonathan abstained when we determined whether to offer meetup organisers a small monetary koha. No other disclosures or conflicts occurred.
I’d like to end with three questions and an invitation to DM me on Slack / email myself or any of the committee members / share your thoughts publicly on slack. Ruby and its ecosystem is mature - the language itself turned 30 this last year! Many would say that LLMs and agentic development are truly changing how we develop software. I am curious, over the next 1-3 years:
- How do you see your use of Ruby changing?
- How do you see our Ruby community changing?
- What do you want to see Ruby NZ doing?
My email is [email protected].
Again, thank you all for attending and for your support of Ruby, our community, and Ruby NZ.

Treasurer’s report

Our latest filed financial statements, for FY25, reflected total income of $12,318 and, with expenses of $17,821, recorded a loss of $5,503. We can carry this loss forward to future financial years where we make a profit and, combined with the $2,196 loss as at end of FY24 we have a combined loss of $7,699 to carry forward.
Our balance of total accumulated funds as at 30 June 2025 was $34,935.

Secretary’s report

An online ballot was conducted prior to the meeting. 18 members had voted. The Secretary, Michael Yin, announced the following results:
- Chairperson — One nomination was received. Nick Malcolm, having consented to the nomination, was declared elected unopposed.
- Secretary — One nomination was received. Yi Sheng Lee, having consented to the nomination, was declared elected unopposed.
- Treasurer — One nomination was received. Tim Ross, having consented to the nomination, was declared elected unopposed.
- General Members (5 positions) — Seven nominations were received, all of whom had consented. Following the close of the online ballot, the five elected members, in no particular order of votes received, are:
  - Jonathan Arndt
  - Michael Yin
  - Philip Arndt
  - Ben Tillman
  - Nathan Broadbent

Closing

Michael thanked the outgoing committee member (Henry James Maddocks) and welcomed the new committee.
The chairperson opened the floor for questions and comments from meeting participants
It was asked whether Ruby NZ has the financial means to carry out another conference: Philip’s answer was yes. A general discussion was had around conferences and retreats.
Nick Wolf, Ruby AU’s current President, commented on his positive impression of the Ruby Oceania Slack (and this was echoed by other attendees). He also, at the NZ Chair’s encouragement, shared news on the upcoming Ruby AU Retreat.

At 8:19pm the meeting was adjourned