Committee - Procedures

Procedures

• It is common for a chairperson to organize a committee meeting through an agenda, which is usually distributed in advance.
• The chairperson is responsible for running meetings: keeping the discussion on the appropriate subject, recognizing members (calling on them to speak), and calling for votes after a debate has taken place . Governance committees often have formal processes (for example, they might follow Roberts Rules of Order); other types of committees typically operate informally, with the chairperson being responsible for deciding how formal the committee processes will be.
• Minutes, a record of the discussion and decisions of the meeting, are often taken by a person designated as the secretary of the committee; they may be legally obligatory (again, typically for governance committees, especially boards of directors).
• For committees that meet regularly, the minutes of the most recent meeting are often circulated to committee members before the next meeting, and are available to the membership of the whole.
• Committees may meet on a regular basis, often weekly or yearly, or meetings may be called irregularly as the need arises. During an emergency, a committee may meet more than once per day, or sit in permanent session, as, for example, ExComm (the President's Executive Committee) did during the Cuban Missile Crisis.