I feel like the meeting should happen in course, we are worrying about speed before the thread has managed to develop a natural rhythm. The council is mostly in agreement already, take that agreement parlay it into a course of action and trigger the first arc of the story. Things will move quickly enough now that we have settled on a path, and once we settle on a way to pursue that.  Then you can directed story at events or introduce a character to participate with which you can use to help guide us and interject relevant information. 

In any case I think too much focus is on getting this going, and not enough on developing the story and getting a natural rhythm for posting for the thread going.