Dear all: Please find bellow a report from the UA session at the APRIGF recently held in Macau. Copies of the presentations are available on request – they are collectively quite large to include in an e-mail. As soon as they are posted onto the APRGF web site I will share the links here. Don — Report on UA @ APRIGF 2 July 2015 Prepared by Don Hollander There was a Universal Acceptance session at the APRIGF held in Macau on the 2nd of July 2015. The plan had been for a number of ‘shortish’ presentations followed by discussion. Presenters included: - Don Hollander, member of the Universal Acceptance Steering Group, covered what UASG is and its work and structure. - Pensri Arunwatanamongkol, THNIC, who talked about their push (technically and administratively) for greater adoption of .ไทย - Edmon Chung, .Asia, who talked with passion about IDNs, some of the challenges of IDNs, and why the community needed to embrace IDN’s to get the next Billion into the Internet. Edmon also provided a structure description of where UA issues sit within applications. - Jonathan Shea, CEO of HKIRC, will talk about their efforts to promote .hk and .hong kong. (Jonathan participateed remotely) - Marvin Woo from Coremail, who talked about their EAI compliant mail system, and what they’re seeing in their first year of production. There were about 30 people in the audience. Of note: Pensri talked about their workshop held earlier this year and how it involved not just the registry, but also government, hosting companies and others. Good progress was made during the session and a follow-up workshop is planned for the end of the year. Jonathan noted that registration in the .hong kong IDN registry has been lackluster, but in line with the results of other IDN ccTLDs around the region. Marvin Woo indicated that Coremail had more than 600 million e-mail accounts, and that 50,000 had been deployed in their new EAI mail system. Their current system alias’s to an ASCII e-mail address when encountering a non-compliant e-mail system. There was quite good and vibrant discussion after the presentations: - One person wondered about the impact on the Open Source Community and was heartened that we’d already thought about it and planned to encourage relevant libraries. They did note that it would be a big challenge to get so many millions of applications to become UA ready, but that having some libraries available would be useful. - Another asked if we had KPIs, key deliverables with dates. Alas, the short answer was no, but that we were just embarking on what would be a long journey. What should have been said is that we expect to engage with the larger e-mail service and software providers during the next trimester. We also expect to have an updated version of the UA Guide available during this time frame as well. This should include some good practice guides. - Another expressed frustration that the ccTLDs had not already embarked on such an initiative and also wondered where the members of the gNSO were. Both ccTLDs and gTLDs, registrars and other parties are active members of the UASG and given the scale of the issue, really needed a global community to addresses it. - We also heard of the strong effort and commitment that Microsoft is making to UA.