Dear councillors,
 
As the Council liaison to the EPDP WG on IDN, I would hereby like to share with you the project plan of the team and gather any comment or suggestion you might have. Of course, it will be discussed during our next Council meeting in October. 
 
In fact, per PDP 3.0, working groups are required to submit their proposed schedule of milestones and deliverable dates to the GNSO Council as the managers of the Policy Development Process. This primary intentions for this requirement are to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of working groups, ensure accountability of the working wroup, its leadership and support staff, as well as to increase predictability for managing current and future policy work in the GNSO’s pipeline.
 
The proposed key milestone dates:
 
The first page of the PDF is a summary timeline and the remaining pages contain the expanded view of tasks, duration, dependencies, and target dates. Upon the GNSO Council’s receipt and acknowledgment of the project plan and deliverable dates, the EPDP on IDNs will produce monthly project packages as you have seen with other PDPs.
 
All in all, no big issue has been identified so far. The first important update, as you have probably read on our mailing list, is that Edmon Chung has been appointed to the ICANN Board of Directors and the Council leadership team has conducted a process to select Donna Austin as the new chair effective from the first WG meeting in October. In terms of where the group is currently in its work, discussing the challenge processes and mechanisms around RZ-LGR determinations of valid/invalid gTLDs and variants.
 
Last but not least, an update requesting input from the SO/ACs has been sent out and you should motivate you respective group to respond to it timely.
 
Please feel free to share any comment, suggestion and questions on the list.
 
Best,
Farell