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ICANN Planning Process

ICANN's Planning Process encompasses a five-year Strategic Plan, a five-year Operating Plan, and a one-year Operating Plan & Budget. The cycle culminates with Achievement & Progress Reporting.

 

The ICANN planning process is continuous and allows for an overlapping of its three components, along with performance measurement and reporting:

  • Five-Year Strategic Plan – Designed to shape ICANN's priorities, the Five-Year Strategic Plan establishes a vision and a set of strategic objectives and goals in service of ICANN's mission. The Strategic Plan enables ICANN to continue to fulfill its mission and meet new and continuously evolving challenges and opportunities. ICANN's Bylaws require the preparation and adoption of a Strategic Plan every five years.

    ICANN Strategic Plans can be found here.

  • Five-Year Operating Plan – The Five-Year Operating Plan outlines the executions that support the achievement of the Strategic Plan, as well as ongoing operations that are driven by ICANN's mission. ICANN's Bylaws require the preparation and adoption of a Five-Year Operating Plan at the beginning of each fiscal year.

  • Annual Operating Plan & Budget – Informed by the Five-Year Operating Plan, the Annual Operating Plan and Budget sets forth the focus of efforts and organizational commitments for the fiscal year. ICANN's Annual Operating Plan and Budget includes the IANA and Public Technical Identifiers Annual Operating Plan and Budget. ICANN's Bylaws require the preparation and adoption of an Annual Operating Plan and Budget prior to the start of each fiscal year.

    ICANN Operating Plans and Budgets by Fiscal Year can be found here.

  • Achievement & Progress Reporting – Communicate performance metrics in support of the multi-stakeholder model of Accountability & Transparency.

    See the ICANN org report to the Board and the Annual report.

Questions? Email us at: [email protected].

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."