Decision
What It Is
A decision is a formal act of a committee: a motion moved and voted at a meeting, a resolution, an item on the consent agenda, the approval of minutes, an appointment or removal of a member, the chartering or dissolving of a committee. It can also be taken outside a meeting, as an e-mail vote with a closing time. Staff draft it with its title and text, kind, voting method, movers and what it does if it carries. When it opens, it takes the committee’s next number for the year, such as 2026-14, and the committee’s bylaw rules, its threshold, its voters and, at a meeting, who is present are frozen with it. Votes or a tally are recorded, and closing works out the result from the rules, with the arithmetic written in plain sentences. From then on the decision is a permanent record: it is never changed or deleted. Rhythm 1.0 had no record of committee decisions; associations kept them in minutes and spreadsheets.
What It Is Not
A decision is not the minutes: the minutes narrate the meeting and mention its decisions, but each decision keeps its own number, votes and result. It is not an election in Surveys & Voting, although a secret ballot runs there and closes the decision from its certified result. It is not the appointment it makes: a carried appointment decision creates an appointment that names it, but the appointment is Committees’ roster record. And it is not an agenda item, though an in-room decision may sit under one.
How It Is Used
The secretary or staff liaison drafts motions before or during a meeting, opens each when it is moved, records the roll call or the chair’s declaration, and closes it. Between meetings the chair puts a matter to an e-mail vote; members vote in the portal and the vote closes itself on the hour after its closing time. Staff search the register for a decision by words, kind, outcome or date. A carried appointment, removal, approval or charter takes effect at once. A later decision can amend or rescind a carried one. Good use gives every formal act a number, a result and arithmetic a member can check. What is unsettled: a removal of someone who has since resigned cannot close and can only be withdrawn, and a carried removal or charter cannot be rescinded at all; and the decisions milestone carries no product decisions yet, so almost all of this is the architecture’s position.
Its Facets
The kind decides what a decision does and which threshold judges it. The method decides whether individual votes or a tally are recorded and whether a meeting is needed. The decision number is the committee’s sequence for the year. The rule document holds the committee’s bylaws, frozen at opening with the chosen threshold. The voters are the voting roster frozen at opening, with who was present. Votes and tallies are the evidence of the result. Consequences are what a carried decision does. Amendments and rescissions supersede earlier decisions while keeping them on record. Confidentiality hides executive-session decisions. Secret ballots run in Surveys & Voting.
How It Relates
An in-room decision belongs to a meeting and takes its quorum from that meeting’s attendance. Its voters come from the committee’s roster, owned by the Committees module, and its consequences act through that module’s appointment and committee operations. A voter’s disclosures suggest recusals from it. A nomination’s slate becomes a decision of kind appointment. Minutes are approved by a decision of kind approval. Secret ballots depend on Surveys & Voting, which is not built.
What It Could Become
Product has recorded no decisions for this milestone, so every rule here is proposed. Open edges: correcting a typo in a draft before it opens, adding a voter left off a frozen list, ratifying an e-mail vote at the next meeting, showing a decision’s change history, how a carried removal or charter is reversed, and whether a body whose rules say it makes no formal decisions should be refused decisions instead of being judged under Robert’s Rules.