announcement from the Berkman Center

[Jim Dixon <jdd@matthew.uk1.vbc.net>]

The steering committee of the International Forum on the White Paper
has been asked by the Berkman Center to publish the following 
message, sent earlier this week to the committee, to relevant public
lists.

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IFWP steering committee members,

Tamar Frankel has conveyed your proposal for a series of wrapup 
activities designed to help finalize the creation of the new "entity" 
called for by the White Paper, in accordance with the White Paper's 
principles.  One of these activities is a meeting to be hosted by the 
Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.  We 
accept.

As we understand it, the Berkman Center and the IFWP are to play
complementary roles: the Berkman Center will seek to provide a neutral
working venue where remaining differences among major stakeholders
(particularly those who have generated draft founding documents for 
the new entity) can be identified and resolved, and IFWP will host a 
completely open wrapup meeting at which the working meeting's results 
will be presented, and as appropriate, ratified (or not) by the
community at large.

The Berkman Center meeting will be of the "lock the major parties in 
the room" variety on the Harvard Law School campus Saturday and 
Sunday, September 12-13, with reports of progress and issues 
dispatched regularly over the Net.  As you know, the Berkman Center 
has developed a web site which juxtaposes documents and ideas 
generated by IANA, NSI, and the consensus workshops at the respective
IFWP meetings.  We see our meeting as an extension of that role: to 
help the parties whose documents are placed there to come to a 
synthesis that's better than the sum of its parts, and in all ways 
reflective of the parties' universally stated desires to hew to the 
White Paper's principles.

Our meeting, your meeting, and for that matter the entire effort to 
create a viable "newco," depend on intense participation and work in a 
spirit of compromise by those stakeholders sufficiently invested to be 
able to effectively veto any newco proposal that does not answer their 
concerns.
It goes without saying that this effort also requires a proposal that 
will fly with the internet community at large.  With the White Paper 
as the guide, and your ratification meeting as a bellwether, the 
parties who have been doing the most drafting and negotiating to date 
will be most strongly compelled to come to compromise in the public 
interest. 

We'll scramble to pull the necessary details together over the next
few days.  Please let me know how we can help as issues arise.

Sincerely,

Charles Nesson, Larry Lessig, and Jonathan Zittrain
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
  at Harvard Law School

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Jim Dixon                                                 Managing Director
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