Committee Types

There is a concept in Robert's Rules called a committee of the whole which has no equivalent in the SBAY Networked Meeting Procedures. The committee of the whole is where the entire meeting body declares itself to be a committee in order to escape the procedural burden of Robert's Rules to discuss a matter more freely, then return to the regular meeting after the committee's discussion is done. We have no need for that because we use consensus-building discussion for every agenda item, which accomplishes the same thing without making the meeting suffer from multiple personalities amid 19th century procedures.

However, there often is a point to assigning an issue to a committee made up of a smaller group of members, and maybe also including others outside the meeting body. We simply refer to these as committees. As long as they are given a clear purpose in writing (usually electronically), they may be used as needed. When a committee meets, it will be its own meeting body under these procedures. All committee results must be reported back to the meeting body which created it.