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ICANN Fellowship Program Mentoring Guidelines

ICANN Fellowship Program

The ICANN Fellowship Mentoring Guidelines were developed to ensure a consistent and effective mentoring process for all fellows. Mentors are expected to adapt the recommendations to suit the needs of their mentees, while adhering to program requirements.

The mentoring process was initiated in ICANN52, when alumni of the Fellowship Program began serving as coaches to newcomer fellows. Following a community consultation, the mentoring process evolved; from ICANN65 onwards, Fellowship Program coaches are replaced by SO/AC-appointed mentors.

An anonymous coaches' survey was conducted in November 2018 in order to gather input from past coaches and to assist incoming mentors. The results of the survey appear in Annex 2 of the most recent guidelines (December 2018). The survey is intended to offer general guidance only, as the expectations and responsibilities associated with mentoring have evolved as a result of program changes, as reflected in the updated guidelines.

As the guidelines are updated, past versions will be archived below.

Current guidelines (December 2018) [PDF, 255 KB]

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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."