[ga] ANNOUNCEMENT OF RESTRUCTURING AT MINC

[MINC Secretariat <sec@minc.org>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
12 December 2002.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF RESTRUCTURING AT MINC.

The newly elected MINC Board, under the leadership of its new Chairman, 
Khaled Fattal,
has approved a plan to reorganize and restructure MINC. This move is to 
make MINC
more adaptive, flexible and responsive to the current dynamic events 
revolving around the
Internationalization of Domain Names (IDN) issue. It will make MINC more 
streamlined for
aggressively achieving its mission of bringing about widespread 
deployment and adoption
of multilingual multiscript Internationalized Domain Names as soon as 
possible.

One of MINC's functions as a forum and platform for all parties 
interested in IDN will
continue and will be actively improved upon and expanded. This already 
includes many
language groups, often spanning many countries, whose common interest 
lies in
enabling their native speakers with proper Internet usage of their 
language - examples
being INFITT for the Tamil language spoken by Indians, MINC Arabic 
Working Group for
the Arabic language, and the Cyrillic language group, JDNA for the 
Japanese language,
EUROLINC for a number of European languages to name a few.

Members of these groups are all currently members of MINC, and actively 
involved in
MINC processes. In addition to leading technology providers such as 
Verisign and i-DNS.net,
who also have staff officially represented in MINC board membership, key 
leaders associated
with  ASCII TLD registry operators such as JPNIC and KRNIC are also 
members of MINC as
well as those from gTLDs (Verisign) and  IDN registry operators like 
JPRS and Regtime.

Other institutions, such as IETF, ICANN, ITU and WIPO, have had joint 
activities with MINC
and/or seen active MINC member participation.

MINC's current list of members and participants is a positive reflection 
of how well represented
the many players of the IDN are in MINC, and where MINC derives its 
ability to champion their
cause. We aim to build on that strength of inclusivity and extensive 
representation since
MINC's inception in 2000 as the earliest international effort at 
promoting IDN.

We will be issuing follow-up press releases and announcements relating 
to the operational plans,
decisions and developments which would fall under this restructuring plan.

MINC and its board look forwards to continued support and participation 
with our partners
and members towards achieving our mission and seeks to build strong 
cooperative ties
with more organisations such as FIAM, ccTLDs with which we have 
initiated strong
and positive exchanges.

Khaled Fattal
Chairman
for the MINC Board



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