The 12th CDNC meeting was held in Taipei in the last 2 days. Participating organizations included CNNIC, TWNIC, MONIC, HKIRC, SGNIC and Afilias (as the registry technology provider for SGNIC), along with experts from TW and CN.

The meetings mainly included updates from .CN and .TW on their IDN efforts individually and jointly. A couple of more interesting topics surrounded the efforts towards a coordinated CDNC language variant table as well as the concern for lack of progress in the standardization of the multilingual Email addressing protocol.

The CDNC continues to work hard to consolidate the works and experiences from CNNIC and TWNIC on IDN deployment and the management of the Simplified and Traditional Chinese variant tables. A number of characters were identified, with proposal and discussions for further adjustments to the language variant table. This accentuated the need to build in capability for future extensibility to the language tables. More specifically, to try to build a language variant table that could be backwards compatible in the future and to ensure that a conservativeness principle is used to derive the first official version of the CDNC table to be published to IETF and the IANA registry. I believe this is a very good approach and exemplifies a cautious, responsible yet progressive approach for the development, adoption and publishing of language tables and policies.

As for multilingual Email addressing, there was considerable discussion and concern to the recently closed down IMAA mailing list. All participants expressed disheartenment and hope to re-start the mailing list to help move the efforts forward, realizing the importance of this with regards to the adoption of IDN. Based on a consensus around the room, the CDNC is also interested to help re-fuel the efforts by hosting and re-opening a mailing list. Furthermore, it is hoped that this will eventually translate into a meaningful IETF workgroup which will be able to produce a set of multilingual email addressing protocol standards.

During the CDNC meeting, due to some unfortunate travel delays, TWNIC arranged a short trip for the already present delegates to the Museum of World Religions in Taipei. The visit was an inspiring experience for me, especially in the backdrop of the often diverging, controversial and even occasionally confrontational discussions on IDN development and deployment. While the tour highlighted the many differences we have among the many religions of the world, it also reminded us of how much we are the same at the core of our hearts in our pursuit for peace, compassion and virtue. And how important tolerance, communication and understanding is to facilitate these very pursuits. Even though at times IDN issues threaten to fracture our Internet, I do believe that it also presents us with an opportunity to build a more meaningful and universal unity among the community.