2018-10-27

Universal Acceptance Steering Group

Help Wanted…   Evaluation of popular websites for UA Readiness and Outreach to website owners raising awareness of Universal Acceptance

Application Deadline: 2018-11-27

Send Applications to: don.hollander@icann.org

V2018-10-27

The Work

To take a list of up to 1,000 websites from around the world and determine how readily they accept a variety of email addresses. 

This is a repeat of an exercise finished in 2017 https://uasg.tech/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/UASG-Report-UASG017.pdf

Repeat the evaluation of the websites from the 2017 study by trying to create new accounts in each website and determine whether each of eight test email addresses are accepted by the website.

Our experience during the 2017 test was this could take between 10 and 15 minutes per website, depending on finding a place to register and the amount of information required.

Part of this time was finding the right page to test with.  This is already recorded in our 2017 results which should make the effort faster.

Also, to perform 20 smaller tests of 50 websites based on geography or industry.  

Background

Universal Acceptance is a foundational requirement for a truly multilingual Internet, one in which users around the world can navigate entirely in local languages. It is also the key to unlocking the potential of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) to foster competition, consumer choice and innovation in the domain name industry. To achieve Universal Acceptance, Internet applications and systems must treat all TLDs in a consistent manner, including new gTLDs and internationalized TLDs. Specifically, they must accept, validate, store, process and display all domain names.

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group is a community-based team working to share this vision for the Internet of the future with those who construct this space: coders. The group's primary objective is to help software developers and website owners understand how to update their systems to keep pace with an evolving domain name system (DNS).

Email Address Internationalisation (EAI) is a material part of the UASG’s work.    

Desired Characteristics

• You must be technically proficient and able to write clearly in English.   Having staff familiar with a variety of written languages will be useful.
• An understanding of the applications of issues around Universal Acceptance (UA) and Email Address Internationalization (EAI)
• Access to sufficient facilities to perform the evaluations.

Next Steps

Please provide us with:

• A brief statement of interest and why you want to do this work and why we should want you to do this work.
• A sample of similar research and writing
• An indication of the approach and resources that you will apply to the work.
• An indication of expected costs and the basis of the cost for each phase of work. 
• The expected duration of the exercise.
• Full contact details
• Two references

Deadline for receipt of expressions of interest: 23:00 UTC 2018-11-27

Send completed expressions to: don.hollander@icann.org

If you have any questions, please send those to don.hollander@icann.org.   Please allow 24 hours for answers.

We expect to reach out to a short list of candidates within one month of the closing time.