[council] Call for Community Volunteers for IDN Variant TLD Case Study Teams

[Glen de Saint Géry <Glen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Members of the Community,

The delegation and management of variant TLDs remains an important issue. The 
ICANN community seeks to develop solutions to enable the delegation of Variant 
TLDs for the benefit of users around the world.

After consultation with the community, ICANN outlines its approach to move 
forward by publishing the Final Proposal for the IDN Variant TLDs Issues 
Project ( 
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/idn-variant-tlds-delegation-20apr11-en.pdf)
  and the Call for Volunteers ( 
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/idn-variant-tlds-call-for-volunteers-case-study-teams-20apr11-en.pdf)

The Project will undertake work to identify issues associated with the 
beneficial and safe delegation of IDN variant TLDs through six case studies 
include the following scripts: Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), 
Cyrillic, Devanagari, Greek, and Latin.

Each team will be comprised of the following: team coordinator, community 
representatives, linguistic experts, DNS and IDNA experts, security & 
scalability experts, policy experts, and registry/registrar operations experts. 
The call for volunteer document describes the details of expertise needed, as 
well as the volunteer selection process.

Successful completion of the project depends on having team members with the 
right skills in each of the six case studies to perform the substantive work. 
Therefore ICANN, through its supporting organizations and advisory committees, 
and through its contacts with the international Internet community, is 
soliciting the participation of community volunteers in each of the six case 
study teams.

Interested experts are invited to submit their résumé and an expression of 
interest statement demonstrating how they meet the qualifications for one or 
other of the expertise areas in a specific case study. Applications should be 
sent to idnvarianttlds@xxxxxxxxx no later than 19 May 2011.

Additionally, ICANN would welcome proposals from organizations interested in 
volunteering to provide local host facilities to each of the six IDN Variant 
Issues Project case study teams. Local host organizations are expected to 
provide meeting and other facilities to support the case studies work. However, 
it should be emphasized that it is not necessary to have a local host 
organization for a case study to proceed. Interested organizations should send 
an expression of interest to idnvarianttlds@xxxxxxxxx no later than 19 May 2011.


Warm regards,
ICANN IDN Variant Issues Project Team

P.S. The announcement is also available at: 
http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-20apr11-en.htm.