Dear all, At its meeting in Beijing, the ccNSO Council adopted all the proposals of the working groups relating to the selection of an IDN ccTLD string and inclusion of IDN ccTLDs in the ccNSO under the Internationalised Domain Names country code Policy Development Process (IDN ccPDP). As a result, they are now a ccNSO Council Recommendation and this is presented as such to the ccNSO Membership in the Members Report of the IDN ccPDP. The report has been published at http://ccnso.icann.org/node/38473. According to Annex B (paragraph 13) of the ICANN Bylaws (http://www.icann.org/en/about/governance/bylaws#AnnexB), the ccNSO members shall be given the opportunity to vote on the Council Recommendation. The voting period starts on Wednesday, 22 May 2013 00:00 UTC and ends on Tuesday, 11 June 2013 00:00 UTC. The vote will be carried out electronically. The ccNSO primary contact of each member ccTLD will receive an electronic ballot, to cast a vote with. If you haven't done so recently, please, check with the ccNSO Secretariat who your primary contact is! Please, do so before 15 May 2013. Please, be aware that the IANA database is not linked to the ccNSO database in any way ­ i.e. even if the IANA database is updated, this doesn't mean that our database has the correct information. For those of you who feel that you know too little about the issues and full set of proposals and would like to learn more before voting, we will host a webinar on 15 May at 08.00 and 19.00 UTC. During this webinar, the Council Recommendation will be presented as well as an overview on how the voting procedure will work. Information on how to attend the webinar will be sent to you in a separate email. You may be aware that voting in a Policy Development Process rarely happens within the ccNSO. In fact, this has only happened once before (on the ccNSO Bylaws changes in 2005). You may also be aware that according to the rules of the ccNSO PDP in the first round of voting at least 50% of the Membership has to cast a vote in order to be valid. If 50% or less of the Members vote in the first round, a second round of voting is foreseen without the quorum rule. We would therefore be really grateful if as many members as possible would use the opportunity to vote in the first round on this very important issue. For avoidance of doubt and to be complete, in order for the ccNSO Council Recommendation to be adopted at least 66% of the Members votes cast need to be in favour of the Council Recommendation, either in the first or second round. Please, let me know if you have any questions! Kind regards, Gabi