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Resources

Ombuds Office Services

The Ombuds Office offers a range of support and services to ICANN community members to:

  • Ensure fair treatment
  • Help individuals find solutions to their concerns or complaints
  • Give community groups and leaders the tools they need to prevent harassment and to prevent disagreements from destructive

To request support or for more information, you can contact the Office at:

The Ombuds Office: ombuds@icann.org

The Ombuds: elizabeth.field@icann.org

Confidential Informal Inquiry and Advice

You can request an informal, confidential, and off the record conversation with the Ombuds. You can schedule a confidential call for a wide range of reasons, including to seek advice about a conflict, discuss your options to address a situation, ask a question about complaint, or raise a concern.

Coaching

The Ombuds Office can provide structured confidential coaching support over a series of conversations to help you work through a conflict, dispute, or a community working relationship difficulty.

Collaborative Conflict Resolution

The Ombuds Office can help you address a conflict confidentially with another person or people in the community using a blend of practices from mediation to shuttle negotiation and group dialogue.

Workshop or Webinar for your Community Group

You can request online and in-person workshops or webinars facilitated by the Ombuds and tailored to your group to strengthen conflict resolution capabilities and prevent harassment. To date, the Ombuds Office has run workshops on Disagreeing with Dignity, Inclusion and Safety, and Bystanders.

Complaints About Unfairness or Complaints About Harassment

The Ombuds Office leads independent, impartial evaluation, investigation and resolution of community member complaints about unfairness or harassment.

Request for Reconsideration

The Ombuds Office has a role to play in certain requests for reconsideration (where the Ombuds is not required to recuse).

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."