Subject: Invitation to join the IDN variant TLD session in San Francisco Dear members of the ICANN community, The delegation and management of Variant TLDs remains an important issue. The ICANN community seeks to develop solutions to enable the delegation of Variant TLDs for the benefit of users in different regions. ICANN has publishing for public comment a Draft Proposal for an IDN Variant Issues Project - a proposal for moving this work forward. ( http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-5-21feb11-en.htm) At the upcoming San Francisco meeting, ICANN is planning to conduct a workshop to discuss the draft proposal. In this session, representatives from different language communities will also be invited to provide an overview of the potential issues with IDN variant TLDs. If you are interested in this topic, we welcome your participation. Below please find the workshop details. IDN Variant TLDs Date: Wed 16 Mar 2011 - 15:00 - 16:30 Room: Elizabethan A-C Overview In this session, we describe a proposed approach to identifying issues of delegating IDN variant TLDs through five case studies. The plan proposes the creation of teams composed of community experts in linguistics, DNS, registry operations, and policy. The session will seek to recruit interested persons for this effort. Specifically, ICANN proposes to conduct five case studies (suggested cases are Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Indic, and Cyrillic) to investigate the set of issues that need to be resolved to facilitate a good user experience for IDN variant TLDs. From these five case studies, an Issues Report will be created. The corresponding Board resolution can be found here: http://www.icann.org/en/minutes/resolutions-10dec10-en.htm#7). In this session, we also invite representatives from IDN using communities to provide an overview of the potential issues with IDN variant TLDs. Who Should Attend? | Anyone interested in IDN variants. How to Participate Remotely? Please refer to http://svsf40.icann.org/node/22193 for remote participation information. Warm regards, ICANN Policy Support