Appointing committees?

Once you’ve had a chance to get to know one another, scope the issues, and set some priorities you’ll be ready to decide whether to appoint a committee, and if you do, who should be on it.

Your committee might be structured along traditional lines: with a chair, a secretary, a treasurer, and other formal titles.

Or, you might decide to allocate responsibility for dealing with particular groups to people on the committee: someone responsible for liaising with traders; someone else with local government; someone else with state government; and someone else with other local groups, for example.

You might decide to have elections (these don’t have to be major events! Just a simple show of hands or ballot will do), or simply invite nominations for the committee, and then get together to decide who takes what role.

As well as appointing the committee, it can be valuable to give some thought to how the meeting will be conducted. For example:

• Will you have set agendas? Who will write them and what will be included?
• How will you make decisions? Will you vote on things, or just have discussions?
• Will you have a chairperson who runs every meeting, or rotate that responsibility around the group?
• Who will record actions and decisions from the meetings and circulate them? You could have a person nominated to do this, or again, rotate the task through the group.
• Will you serve refreshments at every meeting? Who’ll be responsible for those?