Committees

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

We draw examples from the Collaborations Workshop (CW) series, where there are two committees offering 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. For example, the programme committee may be a standalone committee focused on delivering the content of the agenda through identifying programme goals, running calls, making assessments and recruiting keynote speakers.

The Event Lead 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 information on the place of committees in the conference.

Once the Event Lead decides on the committees, they should recruit members for the roles - they may do this by reaching out to contacts, sponsors who are willing to serve on the committees and local contacts at the venue (for in-person events). They could also ask contacts for further suggestions and even ask the wider community to volunteer and put in place a lightweight system of assessment before they are co-opted.

Once committees are organised, the Event Lead 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 action points from previous meetings, if applicable. By way of example, the CW series has three to four one-hour steering meetings in the last four to five months of the nine-month timeline.