ConCom Meetings
Typically a concom meets once a month during the year (or 8 months) before a convention, then more frequently right before the convention happens.
Unless your concom is very small, trying to fit your meeting schedule around the schedules of your staff is unlikely to work well. You will get better attendance by announcing your meetings well ahead of time (best is to announce the entire schedule of meetings a year before the con), allowing your staff, some of whom may have very long calendar lead times, to arrange their schedules to fit.
- See also Reverse Unavailability Polling
Meetings are a good opportunity to introduce people to one another and encourage direct inter-communication and coordination among the crew. If there are many people who do not know other people at the meeting, go in a round and have everybody introduce themselves and say what their role is. Try to keep people on topic and keep it moving - this can take a long time otherwise.
One thing that can help keep a meeting moving is to set an Agenda beforehand. Email this out to the committee and get feedback on it. Some people may wish for some segment of the Agenda to happen earlier or later based on what portion of the meeting they can attend. If there is some segment of the agenda that stands a good chance of becoming a drawn-out discussion, try to cover important topics before that so that people who need to leave promptly can do so without missing any important anouncements or other business.
Often a convention is complex enough that trying to give a few minutes to every area means never being able to go in depth for any of them. Better to have meeting agendas that focus on critical tasks: budget construction, for instance, or staff recruitment or space allocation.
Do try to have at least one On-Site Meeting to give people a chance to look around the event space.
Another important meeting for your concom is the Post-Mortem where you review how things went for the con just past. That can either be a concom meeting or a more open meeting.
