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ICANN New Board Workshop, Frankfurt, 4 October, 2007 | (Not designated as an Official Board Meeting)

Members of ICANN's New Board, which will be seated during the Annual General Meeting met for a Workshop in Frankfurt on 4 October 2007. The formal Annual General Meeting will occur during the ICANN Los Angeles Meeting that will be held on 2 November 2007.

The primary purpose of the workshop (which was not an official Board Meeting) was to discuss issues and ideas related to the chair and board leadership succession.

The workshop also gave an opportunity for the Board members-elect, which were announced as appointments by the ICANN Nominating Committee to the Board, to meet their colleagues and provide their perspectives on the leadership discussion.

The Board will elect the new Chair, Vice Chair, Board Committee Chairs and Board Committee assignments during the Annual General meeting to be held on 2 November, 2007.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."