ICANN participation

What it is | The working meeting of the At-Large Advisory Committee and the Generic Names Supporting Organisation’s Council for the ICANN Paris meeting.

Why it's important | This is the first meeting of the two bodies, who will jointly discuss subjects of importance to both communities, including the GNSO Improvements programme and Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs).

Who should attend? | All ALAC and GNSO Council members, all other interested members of the GNSO and At-Large communities. The public is welcome.

Representatives of Arab ccTLDs from North Africa and the Middle East are gathering alongside the ICANN International meeting in Paris. There are folks who are attending the ICANN meeting for the first time, so the gathering will be a good opportunity for them to get acquainted with ICANN as well as with ccTLD related organizations such as ccNSO, AfTLD, and APTLD. The Multilingual Internet Initiative (MII) is also participating in this meeting to inform ccTLDs in the region of its activities. A topic of great interest to the region is IDNs, and in this meeting participants will have the chance to learn about IDN Fast Track, in addition to the work undertaken by the Arabic Script IDN Working Group (ASIWG).

What it is | The Generic Names Supporting Organisation's (GNSO) face to face meetings are open sessions.

Who should attend? | Anyone interested in the GNSO's policy work is free to attend.
http://gnso.icann.org

 

What it is | The At-Large Advisory Committee and the larger community get together and discuss big picture issues, future planning, and efforts to increase transparency and At-Large community participation in ICANN’s work programme.

Why it's important | This meeting sets the stage for the rest of the work of the community at the Paris ICANN meeting and also for the intercessional work programme through to the autumn ICANN meeting. The community will also receive briefings on various policy areas.

Who should attend? | All ALAC and At-Large community members. The public is welcome.

What it is | The Arabic Script IDN WG ASIWG is a self-organising group that consists of interested parties in the implementation of Arabic script in Internationalised Domain Names. The membership is open to all concerned and contributing stakeholders.

Why it's important | The group was initially formed via the facilitation of UN ESCWA, PIR and Afilias in late March 2008. The group is comprised of linguists and IDN who collaborate on identifying the challenges with respect to the Arabic script use in. ASIWG has already identified and presented a layered model to address these issues. The proposed model is composed of 4 layers: protocol, script, Registry, and application. Extensive and interactive discussions have taken place with regard to the process or the mechanism of sorting out technical and policy issues at the various levels from the protocol all the way up to the application and user interface levels The goal is to eventually determine solutions that are satisfactory to the end user while at the same time assuring security and interoperability of the Internet. The main page is at http://www.arabic-script-domains.org/wiki/Main_Page

Who should attend? | The last two meetings held in April and May have concentrated on the technical discussions. This meeting will focus on recapping some of the findings as well as organisational issues to continue the progress the group has made. The meeting will be of interest to stakeholders with an interest in implementing Arabic script IDNs and contributing to the work of the group members from a linguistic, technical and policy perspective.