Universal Acceptance (UA) Day is an opportunity to rally local, national, regional, and global communities and organizations around the world to spread UA awareness and to promote UA adoption with key stakeholders. The UA Day events will consist of awareness, training, strategy, academia, and adoption sessions held by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), ICANN, global partners, and regional and local organizations. See the announcement for UA Day 2024.

Get Involved

Contribute to UA Day by organizing an event to promote awareness, training, or adoption of UA on or around 28 March 2024 (between 1 March and 30 May 2024). Events should focus around one of the following engagement events:

• UA Awareness: Provide the benefits of being UA-ready, basic technical concepts related to UA, and next steps to become UA-ready.
• UA Technical Training: Provide in-depth training on becoming EAI-ready for email system administrators and on becoming UA-ready for software developers.
• UA Academic Curricula: Conduct curricular development sessions with academic faculty members and experts to integrate Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and UA-related topics in existing technical curricula and design a roadmap.
• UA Adoption: Conduct a UA adoption exercise and share challenges and solutions to become UA-ready, documenting your experience during the UA Day event.
• UA Regional Strategy: Discuss appropriate mechanisms for promoting and adopting UA at the local, national, and regional levels.

For more details on UA Day event formats see the section on Event Support below. These also include links to materials which can be used for UA Day events.

Submit Your Proposal

Your UA Day event proposal must be submitted through the UA Day Event Proposal Form by 15 December 2023. The submission will help specify any support, promotional, and material needs for your event. Events that request financial or logistical support will be reviewed and the UASG will shortlist those that can be supported by ICANN no later than 20 January 2024. It may take an additional couple of weeks to finalize details and confirm support.

UA Day Events

A calendar of UA Day events will be published in the coming months at this web page. You can also access this web page through the link https://universalacceptance.day.

Events can be held at different levels:

• Local or national level: largely focusing on community within a country.
• Regional level: involves multiple regional and national organizations from different countries in a region.

Multiple local, national, or regional events can be held globally. ICANN, the UASG, and other partners plan to organize a global UA Day event on 28 March 2024.

There are additional requirements for certain UA Day events.

UA adoption events require advance work to be done by each event organizer’s technical team to complete one of the following tasks at least two weeks before the event. This will be followed by an online demonstration of the work accomplished by the event organizer’s technical team to qualify for the UA adoption event. ICANN org can provide limited technical guidance to the organizer. Email any questions to UAProgram@icann.org.

• Make your organization website UA-ready by supporting all domain names, including IDNs, and internationalized email addresses in web forms. Allow for processing them to be able to send emails to internationalized email addresses submitted.
• Update an email server to support sending and receiving emails from internationalized email addresses, as well as to create email addresses in local writing systems in addition to ASCII email addresses.
• Update a mobile application to accept all domain names, including IDNs, and internationalized email addresses.

UA academic curricula events may only be organized by universities or educational institutions that aim to develop a roadmap for updating their curricula to incorporate UA training into their degree programs.

Event Support

Based on UASG recommendations, ICANN will provide limited support for UA Day events. In order to receive support, UA Day event proposals must be submitted through the UA Day Event Proposal Form. Email any questions to UAProgram@icann.org.

Resources provided:

• Presentations for UA awareness, training, academic curricula, and adoption sessions (will be available to download below).
• Limited funding per guidelines below (upon request and availability).
• UA speakers or trainers (upon request and availability).

** Applicants who have organized a UA Day event previously are encouraged to apply for UA training, academia or adoption events.

Note: As is typical for corporations in the U.S. and in many parts of the world, ICANN must abide by applicable laws and regulations before providing financial support to third parties.