[LRUG] Meeting sponsorship

[Murray Steele]

Hey all,

I'm sure that most of you will be aware that in recent months the meetings
have been selling out and we've had to have waiting lists and last minute
swapsies.  This happens because the rooms that Skills Matter have in their
offices can only take 60-70 folk.  Given enough notice Skills Matter can
book an alternative venue, which is why I've been trying to get the
registration links for future meetings out there well in advance (speaking
of which the June meeting reg link is here:
http://skillsmatter.com/events/ajax-ria/lrug-june/).

However, these larger rooms aren't free and until now Skills Matter have
been footing the bill.  They've asked me if there's anyone out there that
would be willing to sponsor the meetings to help them out with the cost.  I
have to say that I don't think this is an unreasonable request, Skills
Matter do a lot for us already for free and shelling out for an extra room
isn't going to give them much of an extra benefit.

Obviously we could approach large companies involved with Ruby like Sun or
Thoughtworks, but I wonder if we can get the local ruby community to support
it's user group directly.  Could some of you approach your bosses (or if you
are the bosses, approach your finances) and see if there's any way your
company could sponsor a meeting?  We'll need to work out exactly what we are
willing to give these sponsors, logo and links on LRUG meeting pages is an
obvious, but what else?).

Another solution is to look for another regular venue, but as I said Skills
Matter do a lot more than just provide the chairs, so we'd be turning our
back on all that if we move on.  Any other venue would have to accommodate
~150 attendees (apparently we had 140 registrations for the last meeting, so
this isn't such a far out figure), have a data projector, have wifi, and
ideally be close to a pub large enough to cope with an influx of a hundred
or so rubyists.

The other solution is to not bother with sponsorship at all.  This would
mean that we'd be faced with an artificial limit on how many rubyists can
attend the main meeting and I worry that this might fragment the community,
or make it seem non-inclusive.  Given the current stuff going on in the ruby
/ rails community in that area it seems like it would be a bad thing.

I'm not hugely in favour of the last 2 and would prefer getting sponsors
from local ruby companies if we can.  That said, there might be other things
I've not thought of, so let's put our thinking caps on.

If anyone is up for sponsoring a meeting get in touch with me directly and
I'll give you an idea of the total cost and put you in touch with Skills
Matter to work out contributions.

Cheers,

Muz
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