All,

 

As a follow up to the publishing of the Draft Action Plan for 2020-2021 the UA Measurement working group wants to provide more detail as to the future projects under work item M2 (“gap analysis”).  

 

The UA Measurement working group is primarily tasked with providing the UASG with data analysis on UA-readiness on different technologies. The purpose is to help inform the mitigation or remediation strategies. To this end the working group is pleased to present to you the preliminary project prioritization for fiscal year 2020-2021. We ranked these projects based on an “impact” scale (more on this, here), which is a subjective measure of a combination of i) how far or close the application is to the end-user experience, ii) the scale of users of said application, and ii) whether the application is a major blocker to UA (i.e. critical path). The prioritization is shown in the below table, followed by a more detailed explanation about each item. The projects or items are ordered from high to low priority.

 

Grouping

Work Item

End-User Impact Score

Confidence Level of Completing within Fiscal Year

Group 1

Social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Wechat, Whatsapp, etc.)

14.0

Very High

86% - 100%

Browsers: Worldwide and selected markets (e.g. China, Russian Federation, other?)

13.5

Group 2

Websites: augment with email acceptance analysis (i.e. reasons for not-acceptance, test transport of email), and purpose break down (e.g. e-commerce, media, etc.)

11.0

High

56% - 85%

Second phase of Content Management Systems (CMS). This project is contingent to reviewing the results of phase 1 (tentatively Q1 2021)

11.0

OS authentication in Device (e.g. apple ID)

10.0

Group 3

Research impact on UA about usage of authentication APIs (e.g. Login with Facebook, https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749

8.0

Low

36% - 55%

Second phase open-source applications. This project is contingent to reviewing the results of phase 1 (tentatively Q4 2020)

7.0

Group 4

Certificates

4.0

Very Low

0% - 35%

Common operating system utilities

3.0

 

                    I.Group 1:

                                                      a.            Social media applications: primarily, the working group will be looking at linkification and acceptance of email address in these platforms. We will select a number of applications, including Facebook, Whatsapp, Wechat, etc.

                                                      b.            Browsers: the working group will build upon previous work – UASG016 – to update the gap analysis, but also introduce some other relevant players in the space. The selection of browsers will be based on market share, globally and a from a few selected territories e.g. China, Russian Federation.

                  II.Group 2:

                                                      a.            Websites: This project will update and augment previous work – UASG017 and UASG025 – to determine the reasons for not accepting a type of email address and to test the actual delivery of an email using any type of email address. We may also introduce industry-specific test case for certain type of websites e.g. e-commerce.

                                                      b.            Content Management System, Phase 2: This project will build upon phase 1 of the CMS study. The working group will apply lessons learned from phase 1 and expand the gap analysis to a wider suite of applications e.g. website builders and other self-hosted solutions.

                                                       c.            OS authentication in device: the working group will look at the mobile device onboarding process and its acceptance of a wide variety of email addresses.

                III.Group 3:

                                                      a.            Research impact of authentication APIs: Have you noticed that internet applications offer a quicker way to sign-up for their services using e.g. your Facebook or Google login information? The working group will explore some of these services and test its universal acceptance readiness.

                                                      b.            Open-source application, Phase 2: This project will build upon phase 1 of UA-readiness of applications in open-source code.

                IV.Group 4:

                                                      a.            Certificates: Are website certificates ua-ready? The working group would look at the creation process and test UA-readiness.

                                                      b.            Common operating system utilities: This project wants to look at certain operating system utilities and determine if they accept UTF (i.e. unrestricted Unicode) as a valid input.

 

To ease the project planning we grouped projects with similar scores. Group 1 and Group 2 have a higher chance to be completed during the fiscal year. Group 3 and Group 4 aren’t likely to be initiated this year. This is just a reflection of the working group resources. We will evaluate the remaining projects in the next year in addition to new project requests.

 

We would like to request your feedback (e.g. need clarification, add a project, remove a project, etc.) to the preliminary prioritization list by no later than July 31st 2020.

 

If you have any question please let us know via email to ua-measurement@icann.org

 

Thank you,

Dennis, on behalf the UA-Measurement WG.