[lac-discuss-es] Call For Volunteers: Join A Generation Panel, Speak Up for Your Language

To: "lac-discuss-es@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lac-discuss-es@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [lac-discuss-es] Call For Volunteers: Join A Generation Panel, Speak Up for Your Language
From: ICANN At-Large Staff <staff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 20:59:10 +0000
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@xxxxxxxxxx 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@xxxxxxxxxx  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@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx<mailto:staff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Facebook: www.facebook.com/icann.atlarge<https://www.facebook.com/icann.atlarge>
Twitter: @ICANN_AtLarge<https://twitter.com/ICANN_AtLarge>
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