Click here (http://us3.campaign-archive1.com/?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id=4e9e3ed715&...) to view this email in your browser Forward to a friend (http://us3.forward-to-friend1.com/forward?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id=4e9...) | Unsubscribe from this list (http://icann.us3.list-manage1.com/unsubscribe?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id...) Jump To: Event Highlights (#highlights) | Activities (#contentactivities) | Community Highlights (#community) | Spotlight (#spotlight) | Upcoming Events (#upcoming) | Get Involved (#involved) ** Happy 2015! ------------------------------------------------------------ If last year was a busy year, then this year is definitely going to be busier for ICANN globally and of course in the EMEA region. 2015 is an important year for ICANN, with the NTIA stewardship transition of the IANA functions and ICANN accountability; so we’re hitting the ground running from the beginning! This edition covers the last quarter of 2014 of EMEA activities, highlights upcoming key events for us in the region as well put in the spotlight some of our community members’ highlights. Happy reading, EMEA Team ** Event Highlights Q4 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------ It’s been a busy last two months for the EMEA region, with a few milestones and firsts. Below are some highlights and spotlights: Registry Roadshow Workshop – Europe & ME [19-21 November] "Really like the team competition - made it fun to learn. Best ICANN event I've attended" – Participant feedback The Registry Roadshow Workshop for Europe and Middle East Region took place on 19-21 November in Istanbul, Turkey where we had more than 50 participants. The in-depth, interactive and hands-on three-day workshop covered a wide range of timely topics. The participants learned about Registry Onboarding, Registry Ongoing Responsibilities, Universal Acceptance, Name Collision, Right Protection Mechanism for SLD block list, Contractual Compliance Process, Security Stability and Resiliency as well as how best to work with the Registry Services team and ICANN GDD staff. The event was designed to include group activities and team competition which got the participants to be on their feet working with each other to find answers and solutions. The team make-up was altered each day to allow maximum networking opportunity for everyone. Feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive on both the format and content. In this Roadshow, the MVP Award Panel chose to award the Most Valuable Participant award to everyone in attendance, who promised to share the trophy by handing it to one another at each ICANN meeting. The first hand-off will occur at ICANN 52 Singapore during the Roadshow Reunion. Thank you to all who made this Roadshow a great success. A special thanks goes out to the entire Istanbul Hub team who took on the event as a gracious and generous host. ** EMEA Activities at a Glance ------------------------------------------------------------ We have been busy the past couple of months, with our teams engaging heavily in their respective regions: In Europe Jean-Jacques gives a broad look at what we’ve been doing in Europe, from panels to workshops, specifically with increased efforts to inform and generate input on the transition of the stewardship of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions. https://www.icann.org/news/blog/icann51-and-after-tis-the-season-for-ntia-tr... Key events of the last quarter in 2014: * Warsaw Workshop – https://www.icann.org/news/announcement-2-2014-10-23-en * gTLD Panel – Internetdagarna Sweden - 24-25 November, 2015 - Jean-Jacques Sahel’s panel: “Internet governance – who will shape the future of the Internet?” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPDIAGylmT0&list=PLtDs7N_g_eiY87wxlBFzwl_FeQ... ** New gTLD Stories Panel ------------------------------------------------------------ This year, the event featured a track dedicated to New gTLDs, including overviews by ICANN’s Krista Papac and a panel of new gTLD registry operators moderated by yours truly and organized by ICANN. The panelists, from .global, .club and two Chinese IDN TLDs, got questions like “What’s your business idea?”, “What would be success – or failure – and on what horizon?”, “Do you use backend registries?”, “How do you market?” to which they gave enlightening and often similar answers. Eventually the audience chimed in with “What admin difficulties have you experienced?” followed by an exchange regarding the name collision issue. This was a very successful panel and we look forward to organizing similar ones this year! Olof Nordling * Brussels - 4th EU Hackathon on e-democracy at European Parliament * Vint Cerf listening to EC VP Andrus @Ansip_EU @icann cosponsored EU hackathon on e-democracy in Brussels @h4p2014 * Key milestone in Europe, the EU Council on Telecommunication (TTE) issued positive Conclusions on Internet Governance adopted on 27 November 2014. https://www.icann.org/resources/press-material/release-2014-12-02-en In the Middle East Key events of the last quarter in 2014: * DNS Entrepreneurship Centre Workshop –Africa/ Middle East – Cairo * Turkey DNS Forum - https://www.icann.org/news/blog/a-successful-first-edition-of-turkey-s-domai... * Arab IGF – Beirut, Lebanon – https://www.icann.org/news/blog/arab-internet-governance-forum-gaining-more-... * IRAN Outreach Visit November 15-18, 2014 Our first visit to Iran, where we held successful informative bilateral meetings with government officials, business leaders, and technical community members on ICANN and how to get involved in the process. ICANN also took part in the RIPE NCC regional meeting that was organized in Tehran around the same time. * SdNOG, and Sudan IGF PM- December 6-7- 2014 ICANN was part of the inaugural Sudan Network Operators Group (sdNOG), a 2-day event that attracted around 100 attendees; mostly the technical community and some university students. ICANN gave a presentation on Internet Governance, and another on DNSSEC. On December 8, ICANN was part of the Sudan IGF Preparatory Meeting providing the necessary expert knowledge on how to move forward. * ITU Telecom World 2014 - Doha, Qatar - 7-11 December ICANN was invited to speak on a panel entitled "The Next Big Internet Step: Moving to IPv6 to Enable Everything on the Internet”. Speakers shared experiences in promoting IPv6 and educating their communities on deploying the technology. http://telecomworld.itu.int/ In Africa Looking back on our activities in Africa during 2014, taking stock of our Africa Engagement Strategy, is a blog penned by Pierre Dandjinou https://www.icann.org/news/blog/taking-stock-of-our-africa-strategy Key events: * Afrinic 21 - https://www.icann.org/news/blog/eventful-icann-participation-during-afrinic2... * AFRICA TELECOM People 2014 - Cote d’Ivoire – 18-19 December, 2014 ICANN attended the 10th edition of AFRICA Telecom People in December, presenting on IPv6 during one of the workshops. ** Community Highlights ------------------------------------------------------------ Interview: Prospective Cyrillic Generation Panel - An interview with Yuriy Kargapolov On 14 October 2014, the Cyrillic community met at ICANN 51 in Los Angeles to organize a Generation Panel to work on Cyrillic Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) for the top level. We connected with Yuriy Kargapolov, prospective Chair of the Panel, to get a better understanding of their work. Q: What motivated you to get involved? A: I live in the Cyrillic environment and I am an engineer. I have extensive experience in project management and it’s a new challenge for me personally. Q: What is the main challenge that the prospective Cyrillic panel is facing? A: Firstly, part of the Cyrillic script uses letters (not signs), which are now banned for use in domain names, such as an apostrophe in the Ukrainian, the word мʼясо (meat) is in Ukrainian and word мясо is only in Russian. Secondly, Balkan languages form a group in which there are letters, syntax and semantics inherited by from Old Slavonic variants of the Cyrillic alphabets. At the same time, the Russian language has undergone considerable simplification since 1917. Thirdly, there are communication gaps between different languages in Cyrillic; for example, between the Serbian, Kazakh and Mongolian languages. Finally, there is a significant problem with the cross-confusion between the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic scripts. Q: What is the anticipated timeline to complete the Cyrillic label generation rules? A: The prospective Cyrillic Generation Panel has just started its work, but we want to synchronize our schedule with other Generation Panels. We hope to complete the report on Balkan family characters, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus, Mongolian and Middle Asia family characters and variants by the end of February 2015. ** In the Spotlight ------------------------------------------------------------ .berlin – The Domain for Berliners and Berlin We started with the .berlin project, back in 2004, out of frustration when we tried to register a domain name that was already taken. Within ICANN, we engaged in the guidelines discussion, contributed to the applicant guidebook and participated in working groups and finally applied for .berlin in 2012. On March 18, 2014, we could at last launch .berlin for Berliners and Berlin. From then on it didn’t take long for the first names to become visible in the city, being used, for example, for football championship parties at the football stadium, a huge exhibition on West Berlin, blogs, and much more. When we talk to people about their motivation to register a .berlin domain, we often hear that they are Berliners and their decision for a .berlin name was a decision from the heart. Others claim that a .berlin domain name better describes what they do and where they are located. Also, some underline that the better choice among available domain names in comparison to .DE or .COM tipped the balance. Usually, a key question we face is how a City TLD domain name affects the search engine ranking. To learn more, we partnered with Searchmetrics, pioneer and leading global provider of digital marketing software and services. Searchmetrics analyzed data from Summer 2014 to determine whether .berlin domains provide ranking advantages. Their research results show that .berlin domains rank on average 1,18 positions better than .DE or .COM domains if searches are performed locally. Further research is currently being conducted. When we launched, some aspects of the gTLD program were challenging, like Universal Access, Name Collisions and awareness of new gTLDs in general. But we have overcome most of these issues and can focus on guidance to use and benefit from the new domains. One year after .berlin being delegated, we feel that this domain significantly adds to more choice and competition among domain names for Berliners and Berlin. Genious Communications’ Accreditation Journey – Morocco In early 2011, I decided to take Genious a step further by starting our ICANN accreditation process. I have to be frank; that wasn't an easy task at all. First, being in a developing country, I have to say that everything was twice as hard and twice as expensive when it came to insurance fees, for example; secondly, we feared we wouldn’t get accreditation and all our efforts would go to waste. Especially because at that time there were only 5 Accredited Registrars across the continent and none in Morocco. After 4 months of working day and night to prepare all the paperwork for the accreditations, we finally submitted our file and had to wait the longest 2 months of my whole life but, fortunately for us, we got a positive answer. We started our accreditation process 4 years ago with around 4000 domain names. We are at a bit more than 10,000 domains today and all I can say is we cannot rely on the domain names business only, because even with 100 000 domains and our margins, we’ll be making around 200 000 USD yearly, which roughly covers our fees. However, I can say that our clients’ perception of Genious changed the day we got accredited. We became more trustworthy and that is priceless. Let me explain; Genious Communications is a Web hosting and domain names company. 95% of our turnover is coming from hosting, and that includes dedicated hosting, shared hosting and Cloud servers. With the branding that the ICANN label offered us, we gained more credibility to sell our products easily and, of course, have an international exposure since we are recognized as an Accredited Registrar worldwide, which facilitates business when dealing with foreign clients. If you have to ask me today if I’d do the accreditation process all over, my answer would be, “DEFINITELY YES”. I know that Genious became what it is today because of the ICANN Accreditation. www.Genious.net (http://img.mailchimp.com/404-www.Genious.net) ICANN’s Global Policy Development Support Team Clockwise order from left bottom to right bottom: Terri Agnew, Bart Boswinkel, Steve Chan, Julia Charvolen, Glen de Saint Gery, Gisella Gruber, Julie Hedlund, Lars Hoffmann, Rob Hoggarth, Susie Johnson, Marika Konings, Xinyue (Ariel) Liang, Olof Nordling, Kristina Nordstrom, David A. Olive, Nathalie Peregrine, Karine Perset, Carlos Reyes, Barbara Roseman, Benedetta Rossi, Ozan Sahin, Gabriella Schittek, Kathy Schnitt, Steve Sheng, Heidi Ulrich, Silvia Vivanco, Mary Wong Policy recommendations for the Domain Name System (DNS) are developed and refined by the ICANN community through its Supporting Organizations (SOs) and influenced by Advisory Committees (ACs) – all comprised of volunteers from across the world – in a "bottom-up", multistakeholder, open and transparent process. ICANN’s Global Policy Development Team provides support services to these groups with 24 subject-matter and secretariat support experts, located in 9 countries covering 9 time zones, and speaking 12 languages. The policy team: * Facilitates discussions by the ICANN Community to develop implementable and effective policies, advice and guidelines; * Guides a highly participative, fair, and balanced process in a timely and efficient way; * Supports the ICANN Community to inform and educate stakeholders through various policy and related activities and sessions. Policy development or advisory issues under discussion range from domain name transfer policy changes, proxy & privacy services, translation & transliteration of contact information for DNS directory services, mechanisms to protect the names of international organizations, a framework of interpretation on how country code names may be delegated or redelegated, to advisories on the security and stability of the Internet. Volunteer working groups form around an issue and consider it from all angles, making decisions by consensus wherever possible. There are currently 70 working groups on various ICANN policy issues – most are open to everyone in ICANN’s volunteer community. ICANN’s Policy Update You may have read our Policy Update (http://www.icann.org/en/topics/policy/) that provides links to extensive background for each pending policy issue and up-to-date status. To receive the Policy Update via e-mail every month, simply visit the ICANN subscription page (https://www.icann.org/news/newsletter/signup) , enter your e-mail address and other information to subscribe. You may have participated in our Policy Update Webinars prior to each public ICANN meeting and at other regional meetings. Recordings and transcripts from previous presentations are available online. Please join us on the next webinar, to be held on 29 January 2015 - http://www.icann.org/en/resources/policy/presentations. We welcome any questions or comments you may have regarding the ICANN Policy Update at policy-staff@icann.org (mailto:policy-staff@icann.org) . Thank you for your interest and participation in ICANN’s policy development activities - https://www.icann.org/policy. (https://www.icann.org/policy) IANA Transition What are the IANA functions? Watch this simple creative video that explains what the IANA functions are - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Mh3k8ooB4 ** Upcoming EMEA Key Events - 2015 ------------------------------------------------------------ February 6-8 TF-AIDN 3rd F2F Meeting Singapore February 18-19 AITEC East Africa ICT Summit 2015 Nairobi, Kenya February 26-27 Engagement Mission in Rabat, Morocco Rabat, Morocco March 2-5 Mobile World Congress Barcelona, Spain March 9-10 ME DNS Forum Amman, Jordan March 10-11 Days of Internet Domains in Serbia (Dani Internet Domena Srbije) 2015 Belgrade, Serbia March 15-19 DNS Entrepreneurship Center - DNS Operations Course Cairo, Egypt April 23-25 Domaining Europe Valencia, Spain ** ICANN Meeting: ------------------------------------------------------------ ICANN 52 - Singapore - February http://singapore52.icann.org/en/ ** Get Involved ------------------------------------------------------------ 2015 ICANN Multistakeholder Ethos Award Nominations are now open for ICANN’s award program that seeks to recognize long-standing community members who have served in leadership roles in multiple ICANN working groups or committees. The award will be presented at ICANN 53 in Buenos Aires. More details can be found here (http://icann.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id...) . Closing date is 2 March. ICANN Leadership Positions Open ICANN Nominating Committee (NomCom) is inviting interested individuals to submit applications or recommend candidates for several key leadership positions that are currently open. Here is the announcement (http://icann.us3.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id...) and applications can be emailed to nomcom2015W@icann.org (mailto:nomcom2015W@icann.org) . Closing date is 15 March. Follow us and our teams: @icann @icann_ar @pdandjinou @pointjjs @baheresmat ** ICANN EMEA Offices ------------------------------------------------------------ Istanbul Hub Office Tel: +90 212 999 6222 Brussels Engagement Office Tel: +32 2 894 7400 Geneva Engagement Office Tel: +41 22 819 1844 Forward to a friend (http://us3.forward-to-friend1.com/forward?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id=4e9...) Unsubscribe from this list (http://icann.us3.list-manage1.com/unsubscribe?u=818d573897ed5ea25ee71ebc1&id...) Copyright © 2015 All rights reserved.