Universal Acceptance @
ICANN53
Prepared by
Don Hollander
As many as fifty people at any point in
time attended the first Universal Acceptance Workshop on Day 0 of the ICANN53
meeting in Buenos Aires.
It was the first opportunity for the UASG
and it’s project groups to meet face to face to assess achievements to date and
plan for the next trimester.
UASG Chair Ram Mohan went through the
formative processes of the UASG since January 2015.
Since the seed was germinated in January,
the idea of the UASG has coalesced, was affirmed at the ICANN52 meeting in
Singapore, chartered, project groups formed, leaders selected and work started.
The workshop also heard from ICANN’s CIO
Ashwin Rangan about the real world complexities that a CIO faces to make their organization
UA Ready. For many, this insight into
the real world were very welcome.
Topline & Technical
This group identified two substantial,
priority issues that need to be addressed.
-
There’s a very real need to get
Email Address Internationalization (EAI) software further developed and
deployed. With Microsoft and Google
active members of the UASG the group wanted to put focus on the other very
large e-mail service and software providers – such as 163.com, Yandex, Yahoo,
Coremail and others.
-
Another very real need is to develop
and publish specifications and good practice guides aimed at Systems Architects
and programmers. And associated with
this is the need to get some sample code libraries available
International
The International group has its focus on
the IDN ecosystem and its target audience is the small and medium size
developers. The end goal of this group is to develop guides, tools and widgets to
drive adoption of IDNs. During the workshop, the group identified some near and
long term goals.
-
Among the near term goals is
the compilation of good practices about handling of confusable characters to
minimize spoofing of domain names
-
For long-term goals the group
identified several initiatives. To name a few: next generation IDN guidelines,
discuss a transition plan for full IDNA2008 support by browsers, draft
recommendation to standardized browser behavior with IDNs.
Measurement & Monitoring
This group is going to develop a seat of
measures, both objective and subjective.
The group re-affirmed its desire to make sure that it’s efforts were
people focused. And the group will also
work on some method to capture non-compliant environments and reach out to the
relevant responsible party.
Community Outreach
The Community Outreach group wanted to
focus on substantive and achievable results during the next trimester. Taking their riding instructions from the
other groups on where to focus, they will work on the following two projects:
-
Reaching out to very large
e-mail service and software suppliers to encourage EAI compliance.
-
Developing a communications
package for the smaller organisations that the International group wants to
target.
The Community Outreach group will also look
at UA Branding and newsletters and other activities as resources permit.
In addition to the UA Workshop, a number of
other UA sessions were held:
UA Updates
were presented to:
·
The LACDNS Forum
·
The Registries
·
The Registrars
·
The ISPs
·
The ccNSO
·
The geoTLD Group
The UA Public Forum was held with a repeat
of Ram’s presentation at the workshop and Ashwin’s presentation on ICANN IT’s
activities as well as an update from the four project groups on the output from
Sunday.
At the UA Public Forum we also heard of
work that David Conrad’s group within ICANN is doing to test reachability of
new gTLDs.