FYI on ICANN's website:

ICANN President's Advisory Committee for IDNs

23 November 2005

ICANN is pleased to announce the formation of the President’s Advisory Committee for IDNs. The committee is formed pursuant to ICANN Board Resolution 04.71 in order to “provide the Board and ICANN community with advice on issues that relate to IDN policies, in particular issues that impact the implementation of IDN especially at the top level.”

Committee Members

It should be noted that some of the member seats are intended for specific constituencies and as such the individual on the seat may be changing over time. Further, other individuals than the listed below have been invited and as ICANN is receiving acknowledgements the list below will be updated.

Chairs (In alphabetical order)

Mouhamet Diop CEO, Next SA

Prof Hualin Qian Professor, Computer Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Paul Twomey President and CEO ICANN

Members (In alphabetical order)

Pankaj Agrawala Joint Secretary, Communication and Information Technology Ministry, India

Mohammed El Bashir Chairman , Sudan Internet Society

Erin Chen Internet Engineer, TWNIC

Alex Corenthin Departement Genie Informatique, Ecole Superieure Polytechnique

Mark Davis President, Unicode Consortium and Chief SW Globalization Architect, IBM

Michael Everson CEO, Evertype

Patrik Fältström Member, Internet Architecture Board and Corporate Consulting Engineer, Cisco Systems

Mansour Farah Senior Information Technology Officer, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia

Khaled Fattal Chairman and CEO, Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC)

Hirofumi Hotta Director, Japan Registry Service Co., Ltd. (JPRS)

Pat Kane Senior Product Manager, Verisign

Cary Karp President and CEO, MuseDoma

Cedarampattu (Ram) Mohan Vice President, Business Operations, Afilias

Kraisom Pronsuthe Former permanent secretary, Information and Communication Technology Ministry, Thailand

Imad Sabouni General Manager, Syrian Telecom

Michel Suignard Microsoft

James Woods Product Manager – Domains, Tucows

Hong Xue Asia/Australia/Pacific Region, ALAC

Objectives of the Committee

1. Ensure that the discussions on IDN within the ICANN community contribute to the continued development of the name space. 2. Ensure that such discussions promote the use of languages on the Internet in a manner that guarantees the Internet’s continued stability and interoperability. 3. Strengthen inclusion, coordination, and collaboration of all organizations involved in IDN discussions and the developing implementation of multilingual domain name solutions. 4. Ensure that frequent and timely discussions occur between different organizations and stakeholders (technical, political, government, private sector) on challenges in the successful implementation of IDNs in the DNS. 5. Ensure appropriate evolution of the IDN guidelines, their development into a Best Current Practices (BCP) document, and follow up for its implementation into the DNS hierarchy and within TLDs.

Committee Tasks

Committee tasks are anticipated to change as IDN implementation matures. The Committee’s broad representation will promote coordination of IDN related work that takes place within and outside ICANN’s supporting organizations, committees, and stakeholders.

The diversity of member expertise will ensure that the Committee plays a key role in the successful internationalization of the Internet and thus ensures Internet access for all languages.

Initially the Committee is tasked with identifying and proposing solutions to the following main areas:

1. IDN TLD Challenges: The committee is tasked with analyzing the challenges relating to the implementation of internationalized top level domains and suggestions towards their resolution. 2. IDN Technical Development Challenges: The committee is tasked with providing the ICANN President (and staff) with a list of technical barriers and opportunities to the continued development of IDNs and which the community is expecting ICANN to handle or take part in handling. 3. IDN Policy Challenges: The Committee is tasked with developing and providing the ICANN President (and staff) with recommendations on how IDN policy issues should be handled, the use of existing policy development processes, and the definition of specific IDN policy processes.