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Background on ccNSO Travel Funding

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Based on ICANN's recent initiative to support travel funding for the supporting organizations (SO’s), the ccNSO Council asked the ccNSO Processes Working Group to come up with a suggested process on how to allocate the funding. Similarly, the GNSO is forming a drafting team to develop a proposal on funding travel expenses for GNSO Council review.

The work to create a community travel support procedure began with a specific call for travel support in late 2007 by some in the community (though this issue has been discussed for some time). There was extensive consultation on community travel support. It began as a workshop in New Delhi, with comments received and an analysis posted. A subsequent draft proposal was posted in June, discussed during budget meetings in Paris, and again subject to fairly extensive comment in person, via email and on the web. A “Revised Community Travel Support Procedure for FY09” was issued in August 2008.

ICANN Staff will collect feedback on issues that arise in the implementation of this procedure, and will make clarifications, as needed. Additionally, Staff will conduct a complete review of the travel procedure at year-end with a public consultation at the June 2009 ICANN meeting.

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."