[CWG-Stewardship] Possible Definitions/Compositions of the "Names Community"

[Andrew Sullivan]

If I may just suggest a friendly thought-amendment (it doesn't rise to amendment of text):

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 07:31:46PM -0400, Greg Shatan wrote:

> need to find (or create) instead is a valid *representative* group (or

I think we don't actually need a _representative_ group as such,
because that tends to open important and legitimate questions about
how we are sure that the group accurately represents the (relevant)
population generally.  Instead, it really ought to be a group that
gives voice to a spectrum view and attempts to express a set of
interests.  Those interests are not necessarily _represented_, but
they must be reflected somehow in the positions the group takes.  In
this case, it is the "names community", which is all the people whose
interests and concerns are affected by decisions about the IANA names
registries and how those interact with the relevant IPR.  (To draw an
analogy, the IETF is certainly not a "representative" group of
Internet protocol parameter users, since it's pretty obvious to anyone
who has met an IETFer that we're a very poor cross-section of all
Internet users.  Have you seen our habits of dress?  And since
everyone who has ever used Internet ports 80 or 443 --
i.e. approximately everyone on the Internet is affected -- is
implicated in protocol parameters, there must be something else at
stake.)

I'm not sure how to express that, but the point is that the concerned
operational community -- the people who attend to these issues at the
top-most policy layers of the domain name system -- have themselves an
interest in making sure that the overall name system remains robust
and viable precisely because their own (enlightened self-) interests
depend on that overall system viability.

I don't know whether that helps, but it seems to me to align with the
overall idea that the "names operational community" that comes
together through ICANN processes must look out for the good of the
name system, or the name system will itself fail and be supplanted by
something else.

I hope that is useful, even if rather vague.

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com