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ccTLD Workshops

ICANN has been organizing, co-organising or participating in various workshops for ccTLD registries around the world. Such seminars used to have been set up by the Internet Society together with other Internet related organizations. A list of the workshops is available at: http://www.isoc.org/educpillar/cctld/

In the context of the Strategic Plan 2006-2009, ICANN has foreseen specific training and educational activities in favor of ccTLD operators in co-operation with other Internet organizations.

The purpose of these activities is to provide the local operators with technical training so that they can contribute to maintain stable, reliable and secure services for the respective Internet communities. Furthermore, the workshops touch on registry policies and management procedures.

Workshops organized by ISOC have also provided a hands-on clinic in a lab environment for ccTLD technical staff to learn about existing tools and software for registry operations. This includes demonstrations with the toolset developers so participants can determine how to best format their data to register domains for their ccTLDs, set up nameservice, exchange secondaries, create WHOIS data, etc. Users will get expert advice on how to automate and scale up their current operations, and pointers on how to structure their existing data for use with open source toolsets.

Moreover, ccTLD managers attending the seminars have the chance to meet with their regional peers, to share best practices and to learn from past experiences that both the tutors and other registry managers are pleased to talk about during the discussion.

Workshops calendar

ccTLD workshop in Sofia, Bulgaria, October 24-26, 2006
Download the agenda

ccTLD workshop in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, November 20-21, 2006
Download the agenda | View agenda page with downloadable presentations

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."