Thanks for this Grace, really puts the effort and amount of work put in by everyone into sharp focus. From: cwg-stewardship-bounces@icann.org [mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces@icann.org] On Behalf Of Grace Abuhamad Sent: Friday, March 20, 2015 11:04 PM To: cwg-stewardship@icann.org Subject: [CWG-Stewardship] Seeing the Big Picture: A Reflection One Year into the IANA Stewardship Transition Dear all, As we commence our weekends (where many of us will continue to work on the CWG-Stewardship work anyway!), I would like to share with you a recent blog post <https://www.icann.org/news/blog/seeing-the-big-picture-a-reflection-one-year...> by Theresa Swinehart reflecting the year since NTIA's March 2014 announcement. If you have a moment, please take a look at the statistics reflecting the amount of work that the community has put into this process. We have often been too focused on the negatives to truly appreciate the positives. Have a wonderful weekend, Grace To view the original post, please see: https://www.icann.org/news/blog/seeing-the-big-picture-a-reflection-one-year... Seeing the Big Picture: A Reflection One Year into the IANA Stewardship Transition [Iana stewardship one year 640x426 19mar15] Working Session at ICANN 52 in Singapore, February 2015 Last Saturday, March 14th, marked the one-year anniversary of the NTIA's announcement of its intent to transfer its stewardship of the IANA functions to the Internet's global multistakeholder community. In the year since, the work and dedication shown by the stakeholders all over the world to develop a transition proposal has been impressive. Yet, I get questions all of the time asking, "What is going on now? Where's the proposal?" Like many of you, I'm following these processes everyday - whether it's responding to emails, participating in calls or meeting around the world to raise awareness and discuss both the transition and work to enhance ICANN's accountability with stakeholders, and to support the community's engagement. Of course, not everyone is so deeply involved, and the work of the multistakeholder groups can be sometimes be complicated; its progress not always tangible. But what has occurred since the March announcement is remarkable and is a demonstration of the community working together to achieve this historical milestone. So what has occurred - it's worth taking a step back to highlight what has been accomplished: The community has developed and is deep into two parallel processes: * The IANA Stewardship Transition, focused on delivering a proposal to transition the stewardship of the IANA functions to the multistakeholder community; and * Enhancing ICANN Accountability, focused on ensuring that ICANN remains accountable absent its historical contractual relationship with the U.S. Government. To drive these processes, the community created multilayered, transparent, and diverse working groups to foster discussion and, within those groups, develop working methods and systems for determining consensus. Representatives from more than 50 countries and the global business community are working together to contribute to the discussion. With some help from our friends in the working groups, SO/AC leadership and internal staff support for the transition we have calculated that as of March 14th 2015: Calls and Meetings: The working groups have held over 115 group calls and 6 face-to-face meetings. The time in these calls and meetings totals over 245 hours, and that does not include the countless hours of drafting, prep calls, document finalization, public comment assessment and information sharing. Mailing List Exchanges: The working groups have exchanged over 12,446 emails through the more than 30 publicly archived community mailing lists dedicated to discussions of the transition and accountability processes. Global Discussions: ICANN's Global Stakeholder Engagement team and ICANN leadership have participated in an estimated 219 events around the world, building awareness among diverse stakeholders and discussing the intricacies of the transition. Its important to note that this number does not count attendance for webinars, multiple sessions conducted at one event, nor events that ICANNstaff was unable to attend. It's apparent there is no shortage of effort dedicated to this significant undertaking. So let me again thank everyone involved in these processes, including those supporting them within ICANN and in the broader Internet community. We could not do it without you! As NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling recently said, "I think the IANA transition, by being the most direct and concrete demonstration of the multistakeholder model at work on a difficult issue that engages everybody in the community, whether they come from the United States or any other part of the world, whether they come from business or civil society or from the technical community, is the absolute best demonstration we can make that this is a powerful process, that it delivers outcomes, and that it is a model that we all should aspire to and protect." Yes, our community is in a fishbowl - all eyes are on us, watching to see if the multistakeholder model works. NTIA is confident, I am confident and you should be confident too that, together, we will meet this test. We will achieve our historical goal. -TS