How is Committee Hub different from email or group chat?

It's a fair question — on the surface, a thread of messages looks a lot like an email chain or a group chat. The differences show up over time, not on day one.

The problem with email

Email lives in individual inboxes. When the secretary who was cc'd on everything steps down, that history usually goes with them unless someone thinks to forward everything first — which rarely happens comprehensively. Threads also fragment: a decision might be split across three separate email chains with different subject lines, forwarded inconsistently to different committee members.

The problem with group chat

Group chats are fast and low-friction, which is exactly why they're bad for anything that needs to be found again later. There's no topic structure, decisions are mixed in with logistics and small talk, and search is often poor. If a committee member changes phones or leaves the group, whatever context they had usually leaves too.

What Committee Hub does differently

• Threads are organised by topic rather than being one continuous stream
• Everything stays attached to the building's account, not a person's device
• Access persists correctly through committee handovers, because it's managed by role, not by phone number
• Specific outsiders (a manager, a contractor) can be invited into just the relevant thread

When email and chat still have a place

Committee Hub isn't trying to replace every communication channel a committee uses — a quick text to confirm someone's running late to a site visit doesn't need a permanent record. The point is that anything worth remembering — decisions, ongoing issues, matters that might come up again — has a proper home instead of being wherever it happened to be typed.