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Public Responsibility at ICANN

ICANN provides the community with support and tools to carry out public interest related activities that serve ICANN’s mission.

Featured video: NextGen and Fellows

Which program is right for you? To help you decide, ICANN has created a short video to walk you through both the NextGen and Fellowship programs – what set it apart and who should apply.

Click on the NexGen and Fellows video to start your journey with ICANN.

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    Supporting Public Interest Initiatives

    ICANN supports public responsibility activities to broaden and strengthen the multistakeholder model through concrete tools and programs. This includes initiatives related to strengthening diversity, supporting the public interest and human rights within ICANN's remit.

  • Dprd icannlearn

    Supporting Education

    This focus aims to build a global public audience that is knowledgeable of the greater Internet ecosystem.

    ICANN Learn

    ICANN Learn is an online learning platform designed to help the global community better understand how ICANN and the Internet work. Courses are built for various skill levels, nationalities, and languages.

    ICANN History Project

    The ICANN History Project seeks to preserve ICANN's institutional memory by capturing stories from key figures who helped to shape the organization from its origins to the present day.

    Leadership Program

    The ICANN Academy Leadership Program is designed for current and incoming leaders, helping them to better understand the complexity of ICANN and elaborate their facilitation skills.

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    Supporting Stakeholder Participation

    ICANN has established programs to raise awareness and encourage the participation in ICANN's multistakeholder model.

    Newcomer Program

    The Newcomers Program provides a starting point for Newcomers to understand what ICANN is and where it fits in the Internet governance ecosystem.

    NextGen@ICANN

    The NextGen@ICANN program’s goal is to help unlock new opportunities and understanding for members of the next generation of Internet users through regional outreach.

    Fellowship Program

    The Fellowship program seeks to create a broader and more globally diverse base of knowledgeable constituents to build capacity within the ICANN multistakeholder model.

    Community Onboarding Pilot

    This program utilizes community members to develop the structure, content and process needed to onboard new community members into their Supporting Organization, Advisory Committee, Stakeholder Group or Constituency.

     

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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."