To me, the advisory committee has been designed from the start as an executive body, which is therefore concerned governance, development and all other operational aspects of the project. I don't see how the advisory committee could "Provide guidance and oversight of the Project’s staff and operations" in a software project if it is not entitled to talk about governance or development.
The committee was set up from CS&S' template for fiscally sponsored projects, which we adopted probably too eagerly, because we didn't have enough experience with it, and we trusted their model to be broadly appropriate. There are many improvements we could make, first with the term "advisory" which is a really poor fit (swapping the names of the advisory and steering committees would already have been an improvement…).
@abbe98 do you have any examples of open source projects which use a governance model that would be a good fit for OpenRefine in your opinion? What do you think of the changes I proposed earlier?