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Community Consultation Process to Review Current Fellowship Program

ICANN Fellowship Program


The Fellowship Program is designed to meet the needs and priorities of the ICANN community by creating a broader and more diverse base of knowledgeable constituents. Planning for the next decade necessitates a broad community consultation involving a review of existing practices and defining the vision for the future. This will ensure that the program continues to evolve to meet current and anticipated community needs. It will also ensure that the program's mission is focused to meet these needs efficiently and cost consciously.

Individuals are encouraged to work with their relevant Supporting Organizations (SOs), Advisory Committees (AC), relevant stakeholder groups, and communities to respond to a brief survey [PDF, 299 KB], which will inform Fellowship Program revisions. The Public Responsibility Support (PRS) department will capture this input and update the draft program processes accordingly, sharing the resulting revisions with all community groups for initial feedback. The draft Fellowship program will then be posted for public comment in June – August 2018, allowing for the standard 40-day (minimum) process.

Once all feedback is received from the community groups and the public comment proceeding, PRS will prepare the final draft of the new Fellowship Program in coordination with the relevant ICANN organization departments and recommend a target implementation date. PRS will brief all community groups on the updated Fellowship Program at ICANN64.

PRS will then work with the relevant ICANN organization departments to prepare for implementation of the updated Fellowship Program. Note that the Fellowship Program schedule is planned six months in advance, so implementation of the revised program will take effect at least two meetings after the final program processes are published.

Questionnaire

Please send questionnaire responses and any questions to fellowshipconsultation@icann.org by 6 April 2018.

This questionnaire only refers to the Fellowship Program, the goal of which is to provide access to ICANN meetings to individuals from underserved and underrepresented communities.

Please do not provide feedback on other newcomer programs, such as NextGen@ICANN, the goal of which is to allow access to ICANN meetings to the next generation of individuals who are interested in becoming actively engaged in their regional communities and are between the ages of 18 and 30.

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."