While I see your
point on targeting the tech giants and standards bodies, I believe that community awareness still has value—especially
when tailored with cultural context in mind.
This comment raises questions about its underlying assumptions:
What is the objective of UA? Raising awareness or effecting a technical change of infrastructure? If it's to effect change, the current tactics are doomed to fail because, as I indicated, they're not reaching those who are capable of actually changing. If it's raising awareness, launching a number of videos, hidden on the ICANN website and password-protected, is not what I would call a way to reach the masses. Spending all this effort on a message and then locking it away like this guarantees you won't reach much of an audience. ICANN has a YouTube channel, why hasn't it been offered to UA Day? That would strike me as the LEAST that could be done, considering all the time invested. (I would also suggest that raising public awareness means videos that are less than two hours long...)
Community awareness ... about exactly what? I'm not sure this has been well thought out. Beyond application to Internet resources, engaging in amateur anthropology seems out of scope. About what is the public unaware that UA exists to address? That domain names and email addresses don't yet work everywhere in every script? Why should people care if they're fully capable, currently using the Internet in every script available, to reach people and organizations of their choice? Chat systems that use phone numbers as personal identifiers don't touch domains or email addresses at all. So part of the job of awareness demands explaining why people should even care.
And don't forget that you're promoting what can justifiably be seen as a massive conflict of interest. All of ICANN's revenue comes from rental of domain names, so the proliferation of IDNs is in ICANN's financial interest. Would ICANN care at all about things like international cultural sensitivity if it did not seek to expand revenue from non-Latin-script TLDs? If UA is seen as a just means to enable ICANN and its partners to sell more domains, that will certainly impede ... acceptance. If you don't believe this to be the case, that has to be part of the message.