Many people are intimidated by the idea of governance, whether it be for SharePoint or any other corporate initiative. The idea of getting people in a room to make enterprise wide decisions turns their stomach's and for good reason. It is a difficult thing to get people to agree on what is best and compromise must be king. There is no attainable Holy Grail in enterprise content management - we simply keep getting incrementally closer to our goal of seamless access to our data in a manner that benefits our business.
While stepping into the governance world might be daunting consider what happens when you don't. Chaos, lost information, angry users, discontinuity and ultimately, you'll have to deal with governance anyway! So, my advice is start small, but don't hesitate to step into getting the most out of your implementation.
A good governance committee can help technologists to identify enterprise wide issues before you deploy a product and help business people to communiate their most important data needs. Further, it can be a forum where people feel included in the process of architecting a system for which they will be partially responsible. Information architecture, records retention policy and the like are not owned by a SharePoint administrator or even a CIO. They are valuable assets of the business and must be shared by everyone. And you thought playing nice in the sandbox was only for kids!
I have found success by segmenting topics from broad to narrow in meetings such as this, but beware - someone needs to take ownership of the meetings themselves and have excellent leadership skills or you can go astray. Use a tool like MindMap or Visio and don't be afraid of a whiteboard to map out farm architecture or navigation. Make it as interactive as possible without getting out of control.
In the Peer Discussion area I posted a question for everyone on what you felt are the key goals of a Governance Committee. I'm looking forward to everyone weighing in on this list.