In an effort to help make the content of the meeting agendas for Task Forces and Working Groups more community-driven, I’d like to propose a couple of alternative processes for maintaining agendas for the Governance Task Force meetings. If it works well for this group, then it could be adopted/adapted by other task forces and working groups.
I’m looking forward to your feedback on these. Perhaps discussing these and/or alternative processes can be added to the agenda for one of the upcoming meetings? 
One topic per meeting process
- Create a topic on this platform with the title “Agenda for Governance Task Force Meeting DD MM YYYY”
- Make the TF Chair the owner of the topic so that they can edit it
- The topic is created some time before the relevant meeting and contains any agenda items that have been carried over and any new ones that have been agreed
- If any TF or other community members would like to suggest a new item for the agenda then they suggest it by replying to the topic and, following a discussion/response in the thread, the TF Chair decides that:
- It should be included in the agenda for the meeting, in which case the OP is edited to include it
- It should not be included in the agenda, in which case no further action is taken
- It should be deferred to the following meeting, in which case a new topic is posted (if doesn’t already exist) for the following meeting and the item is added to that meeting’s agenda
Pros & Cons
- Pros:
- Each meeting’s agenda is a “closed topic”. It’s clear by looking at the post and the thread what was included and why for each meeting
- Cons:
- It’s not really a “rolling agenda”. You need to jump across threads to see if a particular item has been moved from one agenda to the next
“Rolling Agenda” process
- Create a topic on this platform with the title “Rolling Agenda for Governance Task Force Meetings”
- Make the TF Chair the owner of the topic so that they can edit it
- The topic has the following subsections
- A section, with the title “Agenda for Meeting on DD MM YYYY”, for the upcoming meeting listing agenda items that the Chair has decided will be included in that meeting
- A section, with the title “Rolling agenda items for future discussion”, for agenda items that the Chair has decided need to be discussed, but not included in the upcoming meeting
- If any TF or other community members would like to suggest a new item for the agenda then they suggest it by replying to the topic and, following a discussion/response in the thread, the TF Chair decides that:
- It should be included in the agenda for the next meeting, in which case the OP is edited to include it in the “Agenda for meeting on DD MM YYYY” section
- It should not be included in the agenda, in which case no further action is taken
- It should be included in the agenda for a future meeting, in which case the OP is edited to include it in the “Rolling agenda items for future discussion” section
- The day of/before a meeting, the items in the “Agenda for meeting on DD MM YYYY” section are copied into that meeting’s minutes document
- After the meeting, the topic’s OP is updated with the new meeting date, and the process repeats
Pros & Cons:
- Pros:
- Creates a sense of a “rolling agenda”
- All the community suggestions for historical agenda items are in one place
- Cons:
- The thread can become quite long after a while! Not really sure how much of a problem this is
The pros & cons for each are just the first ones that came to mind. I’m sure there are others so please add your thoughts to the thread.
Another option is to look at making the agenda a wiki, but I think that would end up “hiding” the suggestions and discussions about the decisions to include/exclude them from the agenda as you’d have to go through the wiki’s edit history to see who added/removed what. The processes above are such anyone can suggest items, but only the Chair can amend the agenda which I feel creates a cleaner “audit trail”.
If either of these processes (or similar) is approved, then it will become part of the Chair’s responsibility to watch and respond to these agenda topics in a timely manner.
The advantage of a process like this is that it would allow the Chair to make the final decision for the items on the agenda and the order of discussion while still making it easy and open for anyone in the community to suggest agenda items for upcoming meetings and allow for a transparent discussion about what should or should not be included in the agenda and the basis for these decisions.