As a member of a less than a year, I am only participating in one committee and can only attend it when the meeting schedule doesn’t conflict with grandkid activities … which come first for me. The committee meeting I have attended are but a pittance of the members actually working in that area. In addition, the total attendance and the actual individual participants vary widely from month to month. Since this appears to be the technical body making spending and rule decisions for an activity category, I’m puzzled over how this really qualifies as a governing methodology.
Is my experience the norm or an unusual situation?
The people “running” most committees are usually a fraction of those using the committee area. More “users” of a committee may show up at a meeting if there is a substantial issue to be decided, but most are content to let others take care of “business.”
One of the issues with committees are that they are informal and amorphous. I’m not certain what the strengths are for them being that way. Perhaps, we can make a pros and cons list.
Committee meetings are business meetings mainly. Unless there is a pressing issue or controversial issue, only a fraction of the people will show up. Sometimes when a controversial item is known about, a whole lot of people show that haven’t attended in a while, just to vote on the topic. We have no determinable membership in committees. People can point to the wiki all day long but the only requirement for there to be a list of active committee members, whatever that means. No one can really define that. More to the point is names rarely come off of the list. It is more like a membership vote than a committee vote at times.
I’d say it is what keeps committees from becoming elitist and/or exclusive of membership. Surely we want everyone to participate as part of the committee including cleanups, maintenance, teaching, etc. but I’m resigned to the fact it isn’t going to happen. I can’t arbitrarily say “you can’t use committee resources because you didn’t come to the meeting”. At best, creating the necessary safety rules even training required rules but that is as formal as we can get. Even that seems exclusive to some since either they didn’t have that requirement before or they don’t think it applies to them.
Good points there. However, we don’t want them as informal as to fall under a membership vote either.
I think anyone should be able to join a committee but they need to actually join it. There needs to be a member list. And some criteria to remove them from that list. We have a rule that says a committee must be 5 members. I would also say that anyone that is a committee member can vote, others will need to join first. Else, like I said before you might as well make it a membership vote without quorum.
I don’t have a good answer, but I’ve always thought it was weak to consider adding your name to a wiki to mean you’re a member of a committee.
It should always be inclusive, but at the same time there have been issues with people sort of “meeting bombing” when they suddenly have a strong feeling about something going on in a committee to which they have paid little mind previously. The history on this goes way back and it got particularly nasty in Science for instance a few years ago. At the time, the leader wanted rules about how you couldn’t be a committee member unless you had attended so many meetings in a row etc. That felt too strong and strict, but maybe there’s a better metric somewhere out there for “who is in a committee”.
As I think Nick and Bill have pointed out, and my experience thus far, it’s mostly a small group of folks (mostly the instructors for that area) that carry the bulk of the committee work. Then during large decision meetings the more frequent users of that space show up to weigh in on the decision as it will affect the kind of things they want to make.
The current rules allow anyone to join a committee, vote in committee meetings and even be committee chair. Maybe only DMS members should be a chair, but the rules do not require that as far as I can see.
Some add-ons are more actively involved than the “regular” member. If you really need a distinction, you might create an easy way to switch who is the member and who is the add-on. Another option would be to require an add-on to be active for 180 days (2X regular members) to vote.