Trustees of the Garden City Ruby Trust. From left to right: Hemant, Emil, Leena, Satish, Swanand, and Dheeraj

Since the conference organization involved receiving and paying out money and in general handling big amounts of money, we created a legal entity with a bank account for this purpose. Garden City Ruby Trust (refered to as GCRT for short henceforth) came into existence at the end of Aug 2013 to handle all the organization work related to Garden City Ruby Conference.

Initially, we explored the option of organizing the conference under the Innovation & Technology Trust (ITT) banner. ITT is the legal entity behind the annual RubyConf India events. While it would have made the conference organization work simpler by taking the financial aspects of it completely out of the hands of the organizing team, I felt it would also mean less autonomy for the organizing team, and hence chose the option of setting up a new non-profit organization.

A later blogpost will detail the steps involved in forming the Trust. Of the 8 members on the organizing team, Prakash & Tejas chose to not be trustees on GCRT for different reasons. The other six members became the founding members of GCRT.

What’s next for GCRT after GCRC14?

The Trust was formed with the intention of encouraging and nurturing the growth of a community around ruby programming language in and around Bangalore. In addition to successfully putting up the first ever regional ruby conference in India (GCRC14), GCRT could be working on the following tasks going forward:

1. Make Garden City Ruby Conference an annual event, and take it from stength to strength. Yup, Start thinking about the second edition of the conference in 2015 already!

2. Co-operate with the RubyConf India team / ITT to help grow ruby community in India.

3. Help organize various events in Bangalore to help the community grow.

4. Potentially fund and manage a meetup.com account for organizing Bangalore Ruby User Group events.

5. Either directly conduct, or encourage local teams to put up, annual regional ruby conferences (of one day/two day lengths) in the cities in and around Bangalore. GCRT could be helping with annual ruby conferences in the following cities and more:

   1. Chennai
   2. Kochi
   3. Mysore
   4. Hyderabad
   5. Coimbatore
   6. Mangalore
   7. Madurai

Trust membership

We have given some thought about how the trust will evolve over the years. Our intention is that newer people should come on board as Trustees for a couple of years, and take on the opportunity to contribute to the community through the events backed and organized by the Trust.

The trust is meant to belong to - and be collectively owned by - the Bangalore Ruby Community.

Current Trustees

Thanks to Hemant, Emil, Leena, Satish, Swanand & Dheeraj for stepping up to be the organizing team members, and the founding trustees of GCRT. The first edition of GCRC will depend on their work for completing successfully.

Request to everyone in the Bangalore Ruby Community in this context: Please extend your full support to this team and support the conference in any manner possible. Also, please start a discussion with them about how the financial muscle of the trust can be used to benefit the community. People interested in playing a bigger role in community building aspects in the future should also be talking to the current trustees about how they can become a trustee on GCRT in the near future.