My opinion/take on the current situation of the Grin Community Council.
Admittedly, there is a lot that could work better. Although the idea behind decentralization is great, in any organization it is good to divide tasks and to organize backup members for those tasks and to have consistency in activity. Especially in consistency we are lacking as members and as council. I will explain more below.
The main problem with decentralization and voluntary council members:
We are all volunteers who have a variable amount of time and no consistent time available, that leads to problems now and then. Especially since most of us are business owners and have families, free time is simply limited and variable with us sometimes having not enough time to actively keep track of everything going on in Grin.
For example, @mcm-mike who took on sort of a ‘leader’ role when the CC was started, had less time in the last 6-8 months. Coincidentally, I also had less time in this period. Even though I announced my upcoming lack of time beforehand, this does not mean the other council members suddenly had the time available to cover for the tasks we normally took on. @davidtavarez took on a large share of the work but it must have felt awkward to be the one to manage his own funding request, organize voting on it and then request payment which resulted in him having to draft his own payment transactions while at the same time he wass taking on many other CC responsibilities while having to work on Grin++. A bit uncomfortable I can imagine and demotivating 
.
Did the OC not have these issues?
I am not an insider but I think they did have these problems to some extend and they managed to minimize the problems efficiently by having:
- clear agreements that council members should attend meetings and afterwards sign transactions. Having a clear pattern/habit works well and the CC should consider copying this habit from the OC.
- The OC had a secret weapon https://forum.grin.mw/u/lehnberg, someone who both a member, who was qualified and got paid and therefore had a fixed time and energy available to make sure administration did not fall behind.
The CC has groundkeepers, but they are in a somewhat weird position of being both insider and outsider of the council while not always having direct access to the information needed (for example having to make a financial overview without having access to the wallets). For a groundkeeper to take on such a role, it would be better to have one of them be a council member with access to the keys for drafting, financial administration, access to Github to manage all the payment requests and access to the CC Telegram to follow discussions. Basically we need or own lehnberg in the CC council.
We need to own our mistakes and admit that going on as we did in the last half year is not a good way forward since we were inefficient, not very effective and some members and contributors got demotivated. We need to agree to have systematic activity on the forum key-base and attend CC meetings. If 2 times a month is to many, at least we can make sure we get most CC members in one meeting once a month. We should try to plan fixed time in the day or week to read up and make sure we all are up to date on what is going on in the community. I do not think this would take to much time, again it is just about creating an effective habit/pattern and we would have a lot of improvements from the current situation.
Should we pause or quit the CC…?
IMO that would not solve the issue at all, it would just make the gap of a fully functioning CC even bigger. If the OC would be interested we could consider merging with them at some point but for the time being I think we need to just focus on practical issues such as creating a system for administration by assigning someone who actually owns the responsibility and by having regular meetings followed by transaction drafting and signing.
Unless we have someone who consistently has free time available to stay on top of everything going on in the project, we need to pay someone to have this fixed time and responsibility. Our experiences so far tell us that among the current members no one can provide this consistency in activity since we all have the Grin CC as a hobby on the side with fluctuating time and energy available. The most logical solution would be to upgrade a groundskeeper to council member with responsibility of keeping track funding requests and administration.