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Collaborative Conflict Resolution

What is Collaborative Conflict Resolution?

The Ombuds Office can act as a neutral guide or coach to help individuals and groups to resolve conflict and disagreements or disputes.

The Ombuds Office does not takes sides nor determine who is right or wrong. The people involved are the ones who decide the best outcome of the process for them.

Examples of Collaborative Conflict Resolution are mediation and coaching.

Participation in any Collaborative Conflict Resolution process is strictly voluntary – you only participate if you choose to.

How can I ask for help?

Any community member or community group leader can contact the Ombuds Office for support to resolve a conflict or disagreement within ICANN.

Please visit this page for ways to Contact the Ombuds Office.

When you contact the Ombuds Office, please try to:

  • Describe what is happening
  • Explain what you have already tried to do to resolve the conflict or disagreement
  • Say how you think the Ombuds can help

What can I expect from Collaborative Conflict Resolution?

The Ombuds Office will suggest conflict resolution method that is best suited to the situation.

Conflict situation assessment: The Ombuds Office will look at who is involved, what are the main problems, and suggest the best approach to handle the conflict or disagreement.

Process and methods: A Collaborative Conflict Resolution Process might be a one-off meeting or several sessions over a few weeks. The Ombuds Office might use:

  • Coaching: supporting and advising you to speak to the other person/people involved
  • Mediation: a facilitated conversation with both/all sides to help you have a productive discussion
  • Negotiation: helping everyone come to an agreement that they are happy with

Unlike a formal complaint, the people involved in Collaborative Conflict Resolution decide the outcome. Because the process is informal, the outcome is usually non-binding – meaning it is a voluntary agreement between the people involved.

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."