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The office of the ombudsman has contacts with many other ombudsman and other professional offices. Some of the offices are outlined below.

The ICANN Ombudsman is a member of the International Ombudsman Association which is mostly North American ombudsman with a smaller number of overseas members. They are mostly organisational ombudsman, with a large number who are ombudsman at universities and colleges. There are also many ombudsman from larger corporates who use an ombudsman as part of the executive team. The mission of the International Ombudsman Association is to support and advance the global Organizational Ombudsman profession and ensure that practitioners work to the highest professional standards. http://www.ombudsassociation.org/

The ICANN Ombudsman is an individual member of the International Ombudsman Institute. They are a professional body for classical ombudsman, who are usually government or state or provincial ombudsman. In many countries around the world there is an ombudsman who deals with complaints from the public regarding decisions, actions or omissions of public administration. Although the specific role may vary the holder of this office is usually elected by parliament or appointed by the head of state or government by or after consultation with parliament. The role of the ombudsman is to protect the people against violation of rights, abuse of powers, error, negligence, unfair decisions and maladministration and to improve public administration while making the government's actions more open and its administration more accountable to the public.

The International Ombudsman Institute (I.O.I.), established in 1978, is the only global organisation for the cooperation of more than 150 Ombudsman institutions. In addition to its periodic conferences the I.O.I. fosters regional and international information exchange. The International Ombudsman Institute is organised in regional chapters in Africa, Asia, Australasia & Pacific, Europe, the Caribbean and Latin America, and North America. The organisation has three working languages, English, French and Spanish. http://www.theioi.org/

The current ICANN Ombudsman Herb Waye is also a member of the Forum of Canadian Ombudsman. http://www.ombudsmanforum.ca/en/
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."