Commission v Committee

一直搞不明白这两个词的区别，去了某老外的类似"咬文嚼字"的论坛，得到了如下回复，共享给大家：

A committee is a group of people who meet and deliberate according to fixed rules in order to make a decision or produce a document as a group.

A commission is a group of people who are entrusted (that is the etymology) by a government to carry out a task. Sometimes the task is a specific one (like ascertaining a particular fact or resolving a particular problem) and sometimes the task is more long-term (like the SEC, that is, Securities and Exchange Commission).

A commission is usually distinct from other kinds of agency in two ways: it has no single, permanent administrator, and it has no independent or constitutional authority of its own―it operates under the authority of another part of the government.

Of course, a commission can be a committee (like the 9/11 Commission), but very few committees are commissions, and some commissions are not committees.

更进一步的补充：

The defining difference is that a committee is part of a larger organization. A commission is an independent group. E.g., The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation was formed by the Senate as a sub-group of the Senate. By comparison, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is an independent agency of the government.

又一位朋友的回帖：

A committee could be self appointed in an organization. Any citizen's group in a neighborhood can form a committee. A commission is more of an organization that is created by a higher authority, like a king in days of yore.