One of the larger Open Source developer conferences is called OSCon in Portland, operated by O'Reilly (those books with the various black and white animal pictures on them).

The event is July 20-24 in Portland Oregon.

Here is the URL: http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/schedule/grid/public

There are quite a number of infosec sessions if you need 'security and stability' justification for budget, but the focus of UA advancement might be helped by being in front of the people who are actually writing the code on the majority of the websites that Internet users are interacting with.

In skimming the sessions, this one stood out to me:

You type "google.com" into your browser bar and press enter: what happens next?

http://www.oscon.com/open-source-2015/public/schedule/detail/41094

Seems to me like participation in events like this would have a large impact.

The bad news about UA in the developer community is that there is very little awareness of new TLDs and IDN - the majority of the developers I speak with have little or no awareness of the new TLDs, IDN, or EAI issues.

The silver lining to that, which I think is the good news, is that there's really not much that could be done to set UA backwards by participating and elevating awareness of new TLDs.

Are there any UA participants that are attending this event to help grow awareness of the IDN TLDs, new TLDs and UA?

-Jothan

Jothan Frakes
Tel: +1.206-355-0230