[lac-discuss-en] Fwd: ICANN News Alert -- Call for Volunteers: Developing the Process for Root IDN Table Creation and Maintenance

[Jacqueline Morris]

FYI
IDNs have been of great importance to APRALO and EURALO - I would
think that it would also be important for Spanish speakers, as it
allows for accents ad characters in the tld, making them more sensible
in the native language.

Jacqueline A. Morris
Technology should be like oxygen: Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible and
Free. (after Chris Lehmann )





News Alert

http://www.icann.org/en/news/announcements/announcement-18jun12-en.htm

________________________________

Call for Volunteers: Developing the Process for Root IDN Table
Creation and Maintenance

18 June 2012

* Deadline for responses is 13 July 2012

ICANN is seeking volunteers to work on advancing IDN capabilities in
the DNS. The project 2.1 "Root IDN Table Process" part of the IDN
Variant TLD Program, is designed to develop, in consultation with the
community, the process to define:

allowed code points,
corresponding variant code points, and
related allowed states for IDN Variant TLDs.

ICANN is soliciting participation from volunteers with the following
areas of expertise: IDNA, DNS, Linguistics/Unicode, Policy.

The project team will include additional consultant expertise to help
in the process.

ICANN has a limited budget to support team meetings such as travel,
accommodation, and other expenses.

General responsibilities for volunteers:

Contribute to developing the Process for Root IDN Table Creation and Maintenance
Research and provide input on issues discussed during meetings
Attend two face-to-face meetings (likely during the last week of
August in Los Angeles, US, and mid-October 2012 in Toronto, Canada)
Participate in regular teleconferences (time to be determined)
Expected time commitment of 2 to 4 hours per week during a 4-month period

IDNA Expertise qualifications:

Expertise with IDNA and preferably active on internationalization work
Participation in relevant IDNA working groups

DNS Expertise qualifications:

Expertise with DNS standards
Active in related DNS technical fora (e.g., IETF DNSext, DNSop)

Linguistics/Unicode expertise qualifications:

Expertise in linguistics
Familiarity with Unicode

Policy expertise qualifications:

Participation in ICANN's policy development process; or
Have participated in, at least, one ICANN working group, preferably on
IDN related issues

Selection and Recruitment Process for Case Study Members:

Indications of interest should be sent to idnvarianttlds at icann.org no
later than 13 July 2012.
Interested experts are invited to submit a résumé (Curriculum Vitae)
and an expression of interest statement demonstrating how they meet
the qualifications for one or more of the areas of expertise specified
above.
The ICANN IDN Variant TLD Program team will select the team members
ensuring a diverse composition of the members in terms of
language/script communities represented.
Applicants will be notified no later than 30 July 2012.

Background on the IDN Variant TLD Program

On 20 April 2011, ICANN announced the IDN Variant Issues Project to
explore the benefits and risks associated with the potential inclusion
of IDN variant TLDs in the DNS root zone. This project was initiated
in response to a 2010 ICANN Board of Directors resolution. Two phases
of the project have been completed to date.

Phase I involved the formation of six case study teams for the Arabic,
Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek and Latin scripts. These teams
were comprised of community experts with support from ICANN that
worked on identifying issues related to IDN variant TLDs for each
particular script, resulting in the publication in October 2011 of six
individual reports detailing their findings.

Phase II focused on integrating those six case study reports into the
Integrated Issues Report. To complete this phase, ICANN formed a
coordination team comprised of experts from each of the case study
teams. The coordination team advised ICANN on completing the
Integrated Issues Report, which summarizes and categorizes the various
issues related to the identification and management of IDN variant
TLDs.

The next phase (phase III) outlined in the proposed program plan
includes a number of activities resulting from the issues identified
in the final Integrated Issues Report [PDF, 2.15 MB]. The work is now
focused on using the approach outlined in the Integrated Issues Report
to define milestones that must be completed to manage the
implementation of IDN variant TLDs.

The goal of the program is to define the necessary processes that must
be in place to enable the management of variant TLDs. This
incorporates the creation and maintenance of IDN tables for the root
zone, and updating operational processes as appropriate to allow for
the implementation of the IDN variant TLDs.