Committees

Committees are great ways to shape the event’s programme and get help with logistics, while giving people credit for taking part.

As an example for the CW series, there are two committees which offer different types of help and advice.

• A steering/programme committee

  • Help with the agenda
  • Direction of the workshop
  • Publicity contacts
  • Keynote suggestions
  • Ideas for sponsors
  • Review of contributions or managing reviews of contributions if you have a different set of reviewers (e.g. for mini workshops in the case of CW).

• An organising committee

  • Focused on logistics (e.g. who will serve the special meals)
  • Identifying roles at the event (e.g. social media event amplifier)

Different types and sizes of workshops will need different committees, roles and responsibilities.

The EL should decide what type, number, size and complexity of committees are needed for the workshop.

There is useful guidance available for larger conferences and committee roles published by the IEEE. For training focused workshops, The Carpentries offer some advice. The Research Software Engineers annual conference attracts 300+ attendees and offers excellent information on the place of committees in the conference and details of what committee roles entail <https://rse.ac.uk/conf2019/get-involved/>.

Once the EL decides on the committees, they should recruit members for the roles - they may do this by using a special status (e.g. suitable contacts, sponsors who are willing for the steering committee and local contact who can help with logistics for the organising committee) or they could use a system where people volunteer and a lightweight system of assessment before they are co - opted.

Once committees are organised, the EL has to think of how many meetings to have and for how long they should be held. Each meeting should have at least a few standing items, key items to resolve and actions points from previous meetings, if applicable.