[CWG-Stewardship] The work of CWG Stewardship has come to an end

[Andrew Sullivan]

Dear colleagues,

On Sun, Oct 02, 2016 at 09:25:28PM +0000, Lise Fuhr wrote:

>  You will recall that we had an initial attempt at a model and when
> this failed to get adequate support from the community, the CWG went
> back to work and produced a revised model.

I hope it is not too late for me to echo the praise for the chairs and
the community on the success of the collective effort in the IANA
stewardship transition.  I said at an ICANN meeting some time ago that
even though I believe in it I often feel despair that the
community-based model is too fractious; but that every time I am
proved wrong.  Once again, it happened, and just like every other time
my despair turned into jubiliation.  We are so much stronger together
for our willingless to act together.

I think Lise's point above perfectly highlights why this is true.
Working together in a community, and trying hard for consensus, means
that even carefully-crafted approaches can fail because someone comes
along with strong and good objections.  We who believe in multiple
stakeholders and community consensus take every failure to achieve
consensus as evidence that more work is needed, that a better
agreement can be reached, and that the truest sense of "common
interest" can be found.  It's often ugly and painful and frustrating,
but it also provides a strength that we, all of us, should depend
upon.

This network of networks that we together express every day is not a
model of ease, or simple ways of working, or even always of comity.
But it is a marvel because it eventually delivers the goods: enormous
numbers of people can live with the working compromise, knowing their
view counts too.  The functional spirit of the Internet comes out in
these ways of working, and we each must continue to nurture that
spirit.

I am grateful to count you among my friends and colleagues, and will
always be extremely proud of what we did together.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com