ICANN

Interested to learn, thanks to Francesco, that Tina Dam might soon be heading home. Since 2003, Tina has been a prominent member of ICANN's staff, first as liaison to the gTLD registries, and since 2006 as manager of the IDN program.

Nature has undoubtedly been kind to Tina, (who would rather not dwell on her past as an ex miss Denmark :-), a bright individual who has brought ICANN qualifications as diverse as maths, physics and business (she has a Master of Science in Mathematics and Physics and a BBA in Marketing Management and International Trade.)

She clearly understands the very difficult topic of IDNs better than most. Not only that, on several occasions she's actually managed to explain it to me in such a way as I could understand it as well! No mean feat.

And she's passionate about it, something which has fuelled the recent progress made by ICANN on IDN TLDs (making non-ASCII characters work for the part left of the dot, the suffix), culminating in the current successful live test of 11 non-English scripts as IDNs (two new scripts have just been added).

So if people like Tina are leaving ICANN, will the organisation suffer from it? And why would they be thinking about leaving in the first place? I can't say for the first question, but I do have an idea about the second...