The Grand Council is a committee appointed by the SCA Board of Directors, to examine the structure of the Corporation and Society, and make recommendations about how to make that structure work best. There are roughly 40 members of the Council, spread around the Society; the makeup of the Council is designed to represent as many different viewpoints as possible.
The Council is a sort of "virtual committee", working mainly through correspondence. The main channel of this correspondence is the Grand Council Chronicle, which was originally a weekly digest of postings from the members of the Council, and is now an interactive mailing list. All are encouraged to read the Chronicle, and talk with the members of the Council about your opinions of the questions raised. To subscribe to the Chronicle, write to "listserv@listserv.aol.com", and put:
subscribe scagc-l
in the body of your message. Note that the Chronicle sometimes gets considerable volume; if you can't cope with that, you may instead want to track it through the back issues, which are available here.
The policies of the Council are more-or-less as set forth in the first issue; take a look there for an idea of how things work.
The Council has been debating proposals for the global structure of the Society; specifically, how the Society should be organized, given the reality that there are now a number of Corporations in various mundane jurisdictions. A detailed proposal for dealing with this has been submitted to the Board of Directors, and they are seeking input on it.
The Council debated and voted on proposals for electing, and otherwise putting checks on, the Board. The following proposals were put forth:
There was also at least one related proposal, for a mechanism of mandatory polling, also propounded by Galleron.
The Council also has some working groups; you can find their deliberations here.
This section contains pointers to other documents that may be relevant to the GC's work.
Here you will find a report by Master Bertram, on the subject of outsourcing the SCA's Corporate Office. (Note that this is not a GC-produced report, but may provide useful information for exploring this topic.)
The initial members of the Grand Council were a collection of Kingdom appointees, plus some people who were involved in the process in one way or another. The second half of the Council was appointed by the Board based on recommendations from a nominating committee made up of Caroline Forbes, Tibor of Rock Valley, and Corwyn da Costa. The list of applicants can be found here. The deliberations of the committee, and all commentary, were public, and can be found here and here. The final report of the committee can be found here, with a cover letter here. (Be warned that most of these files are simply large ASCII text files, with no formatting or anything.)