ICANN is pleased to announce the formation of a global volunteer team, comprised of community experts, who will work with ICANN on the project to define the Label Generation Ruleset Process for the DNS root zone. This project is part of the IDN Variant TLD Program (see below) that is intended to lead to the delegation of IDN Variant TLDs.  Delegation of these types of IDN TLDs is expected to broaden global participation in the domain name system, but must be accomplished in a way that ensures good user experience.

This particular project will develop  the process to define allowed code points, corresponding exchangeable variant code points, and related allowed states for IDN Variant TLDs.

The project requires significant technical expertise and the individual members of the volunteer team (listed below) possess capabilities in IDNA, Domain Name System, Linguistics, Unicode and Policy Development.

The volunteer team will undertake the work through periodic teleconference calls and two face-to-face meetings. The first meeting will be on 29-30 August 2012 in Los Angeles, United States. The second two-day working session is planned during the ICANN meeting in Toronto, Canada. There will be an open public session in the Toronto meeting at which ICANN staff and volunteer team representatives will present an update on the progress and answer questions.

The volunteer team is comprised of the following members from 18 countries and territories:

Fahd A. Batayneh
Chris Dillon
Neha Gupta
Sarmad Hussain
Akshat Joshi
Daniel Kalchev
Yoav Keren
Dmitry Kohmanyuk
Mahesh Kulkarni
Nadya Morozova
Panagiotis Papaspiliopoulos
Alireza Saleh
Vaggelis Segredakis
James Seng
Vladimir Shadrunov
Syed Iftikhar H.  Shah
Will Shorter
Alexei Sozonov
Mirjana Tasic
Joseph Yee
Yoshiro Yoneya
Zhoucai (Joe) Zhang
Linlin Zhou
Team Observers:
Rinalia Abdul Rahim
Edmon Chung
Raymond Doctor

ICANN has updated the IDN Variant TLD Program Plan [PDF, 576 KB] that describes the projects that are intended to lead to the delegation of IDN variant TLDs. The plan defines the processes that must be in place to enable the delegation and management of IDN Variant TLDs.

Two previous versions of the plan have been posted for public comment and discussed with the community during the ICANN meeting in Costa Rica in March 2012. This latest version reflects the latest public input.

The Program follows on from the IDN Variant Issues Project that completed its work with the publication of the final Integrated Issues Report [PDF, 2.15 MB] on 20 February 2012.

Interested members of the community can receive updates and participate in the discussion of the variant work by subscribing to the vip@icann.org mailing list (https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/vip) or by visiting the Community Wiki at: https://community.icann.org/display/VIP/