At the Valencia Plenary meeting on 7–9 July, 2017, the Working Group on the organization and structure of the ICSP recommended amendment of the Statutes of the ICSP (Dijkshoorn L.Int J Syst Evol Microbiol 2018; 68: 2104–2110). In October 2017, our Executive-Secretary, Lenie Dijkshoorn, sent out a call for participation in this working group, which began work in December, 2017. The members included William B. Whitman, Carolee Bull, Hans-Jürgen Busse, Pierre-Edouard Fournier, Aharon Oren, and Stefano Ventura. During the Winter and Spring, 2018, a large number of revisions were discussed by the working group. In addition, comments were solicited from Dan Brown [Secretary for Subcommittees on Taxonomy], Iain Sutcliffe [Chair ICSP], Fanus Venter [Member at Large, EB-ICSP], and Martha Trujillo [Editor-in-Chief of IJSEM]. The draft Statutes were then presented to the Executive Board [EB] at its online meeting on May 31, 2018. The EB asked that the working group circulate the draft to the members of the ICSP for comments for 45 days and that comments be returned by July 27, 2018. After that time, the working group incorporated additional suggestions before the final submission to IJSEM for publication. According to our current statutes, there will then be a period of 90 days following publication for further deliberation before a vote by the ICSP members.