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Minutes - Special Meeting of the PTI Board | 7 October 2019

A Regular Meeting of the PTI Board of Directors was held telephonicallyon 7 October 2019 at 14:00 UTC.

The following Directors participated in all or part of the meeting: Lise Fuhr (Chair), David Conrad, Kim Davies (PTI President) and Wei Wang.

PTI Secretary: Samantha Eisner (PTI Secretary).

The following Executives and Staff participated in all or part of the meeting: Aaron Jimenez (Board Operations Senior Coordinator (ICANN)); Xavier Calvez (Chief Financial Officer (ICANN)); Becky Nash (PTI Treasurer).

The Chair called the meeting to order and introduced the agenda.

  1. Approval of Posting FY21 PTI Budget for Public Comment

    The President and the Treasurer jointly presented the PTI Board with the PTI FY21 Operating Plan and Budget. The President noted that a series of engagements and presentations were held with the community to identify the priorities for the FY21 PTI Budget. Minimal feedback was received, and all feedback received demonstrates support for the PTI's proposed priorities.

    The President informed the Board that the FY21 PTI Operating Plan is informed by and aligns with the ICANN Strategic Objectives developed by a community-driven bottom up process. The adopted version of this Plan will become a component of ICANN's FY21 Operating Plan and Budget.

    The President provided a brief overview of the PTI Operating Plan and Budget Structure.

    Responding to a question from the Chair on Shared Services, the President clarified that PTI has direct shared and direct dedicated costs pertaining to "security". In terms of shared services (general IT infrastructure that ICANN maintains), the team that supports ICANN as a whole do not do any additional work for PTI. On the other hand, for a security function that is very specific and requires specific resources, those support services from other departments fall under "Direct Shared" category.  To provide clarity, PTI will make certain adjustments to the presentation for public consumption.

    The Treasurer continued the presentation with the FY21 PTI Budget Summary. The Treasurer continued the presentation with a breakdown of the PTI FY21 Budget by cost category.

    Responding to a question from the Chair on whether PTI has put aside enough to enhance and automate its systems, the President elaborated on some of the factors that have been considered, and its approach towards maintaining the same level of development for PTI from this year. To provide some clarity, PTI will make some adjustments to the document to demonstrate as to why the budget is relatively flat, i.e. that PTI has not had any requirements to move at a faster pace.

    In relation to the funding of PTI services, the Chair requested that some adjustments be made, and  Treasurer and Xavier Calvez (Chief Financial Officer, ICANN) provided some language suggestions to the document.

    The Treasurer concluded the presentation by providing an overview of the anticipated timelines and next steps.

    Following the discussion on the FY21 PTI Operating Plan and Budget, and subject to the agreed changes being incorporated into the document, the PTI Board agreed that it is ready for public comment.

    The Board took the following action:

    Resolved (PTI2019.10.07.01), the PTI Board directs the President or his designee to post the PTI draft Operating Plan and Budget, updated to reflect requested modifications, for public comment.

    RATIONALE FOR RESOLUTION PTI2019.10.07.01:

    The PTI Board is taking this action in alignment with its Bylaws obligations under Section 9.2(c) that require a draft PTI Operating Plan and Budget to be posted for comment.

    All PTI Board Members in attendance voted in favor of Resolution PTI2019.10.07.01.

  2. Any Other Business

    The Chair updated the PTI Board that Trang Nguyen, a PTI Director, has left ICANN as of early October.  David Conrad informed the PTI Board that ICANN is currently doing an internal search to find a suitable replacement by ICANN66 in Montreal.

    The Chair called the meeting to a close.

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."