Hi Colleagues,

In case you are interested.

Regards

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: ICANN At-Large Staff <staff@atlarge.icann.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:58:30 +0000
Subject: [ALAC-Announce] Call For Volunteers: Join A Generation Panel,
Speak Up for Your Language
To: "alac-announce@atlarge-lists.icann.org"
<alac-announce@atlarge-lists.icann.org>

Dear All,

Satish Babu, Co-Chair of the At-Large Internationalized Domain Name
(IDN) Policy Working Group, in collaboration with Sarmad Hussain,
Senior Manager of the ICANN IDN Program, has requested a call for
volunteers in the Generation Panel. Kindly see the details below.

**
Speak up for your Language! Join a Panel Today

In the past, labels in the Internet’s Root Zone could only contain
ASCII characters. The rules for creating new top-level domain labels
were simple: labels must (i) only be composed of letters in the
English alphabet, and (ii) consist of two to 63 characters. All of
that is changing now. The future holds a multilingual Internet, where
a user from anywhere across the world can navigate entirely in his or
her native language.

Be a part of this historic change! ICANN is calling for volunteers to
serve on one of several panels that will define the rules for
generating new top-level domain labels for the script or writing
systems for their community.

Join a Generation Panel today by emailing idntlds@icann.org. Make sure
to tell us the language you speak and the script or writing system you
want to get involved with. Please help inform and motivate others to
join as well.

The goal of these panels is to support the use of Internationalized
Domain Names (IDNs) by determining what is a valid top-level domain
label in each script or writing system. This involves answering three
questions: (i) which subset of characters from the various scripts can
be used to form a label*, (ii) which of these characters (if any) may
be considered confusable or variants by end users, and (iii) what are
additional constraints** on these labels?

As there is a single Root Zone, all such label generation rules for
all the scripts must be merged into a single reference, which is
called the Label Generation Rule-set (LGR).  The ICANN community has
established a procedure<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/lgr-procedure-20mar13-en.pdf>
to develop the LGR for the Root Zone. This procedure is divided into
three steps:

  1.  The basis is a subset of Unicode code points which may be
appropriate for the Root Zone and called the Maximal Starting
Repertoire (MSR).
  2.  Communities representing various scripts (e.g., Arabic,
Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, Chinese, Latin, Thai, etc.) are invited
to organize into Generation Panels to start from the MSR and propose
the label generation rules (which contains the three types of rules
defined above) for their respective scripts.
  3.  The script-based proposals developed by the communities are
reviewed by a panel of experts called the Integration Panel. Proposals
that meet the criteria in the
procedure<https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/lgr-procedure-20mar13-en.pdf>
are integrated into the LGR by the Integration Panel. The LGR is
incrementally built upon until it contains all the necessary scripts.

For Step 1, ICANN recently released the Maximal Starting Repertoire
(MSR-1)<https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2014-06-20-en>,
covering 22 scripts (Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian,
Greek, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Han, Hangul, Hebrew, Hiragana, Kannada,
Katakana, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and
Thai) and containing 32,790 code points short-listed from 97,973
allowable code points from Unicode version 6.3. Work on additional
scripts will be completed soon.

Step 2 is now underway; ICANN needs your help in developing proposals
to extend the Root Zone LGR to cover each of these scripts. There is a
role for everyone: general script community representation as well as
volunteers with knowledge of scripts, linguistics, Unicode, IDNA/DNS
or policy.

Volunteering is easy; just send an email to idntlds@icann.org.  Join a
Generation Panel today. Help ICANN support top-level domain names in
your language!

Note:
*Code points appropriate for labels must be letters and should be in
widespread modern use.
**For example, a label cannot be formed entirely by combining marks
and must contain at least two letters

Regards,

Heidi Ullrich, Silvia Vivanco, Ariel Liang, Gisella Gruber, Nathalie
Peregrine and Terri Agnew
ICANN Policy Staff in support of ALAC
E-mail: staff@atlarge.icann.org<mailto:staff@atlarge.icann.org>
Facebook: www.facebook.com/icann.atlarge<https://www.facebook.com/icann.atlarge>
Twitter: @ICANN_AtLarge<https://twitter.com/ICANN_AtLarge>





--
Barrack O. Otieno
+254721325277
+254-20-2498789
Skype: barrack.otieno
http://www.otienobarrack.me.ke/

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