Call for Proposals: UA Day 2025

First introduced in 2023, Universal Acceptance (UA) Day is an opportunity to mobilize local, national, regional, and global communities and organizations to champion UA on a global scale. UA is a technical best practice that ensures all valid domain names and email addresses, regardless of script, language or character length, can be equally used by all Internet-enabled applications, devices, and systems. As in past years, UA Day 2025 events will consist of a mix of in-person, virtual, and hybrid sessions held by the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), global partners, and regional and local organizations. Discover more about the inaugural UA Day in 2023 and the second event in 2024 on this page.

Get involved with UA Day by organizing an event to promote UA awareness, training, or adoption. Events should focus around one of the following types of session:

• UA Awareness: Provide a high-level overview of UA and Email Address Internationalization (EAI), the benefits of being UA-ready, basic technical concepts related to UA and next steps for becoming 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: Work with academic faculty members and experts to integrate Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and UA-related topics into existing technical curricula and design a roadmap.
• UA Adoption: Conduct a UA adoption exercise and share challenges and solutions to becoming UA-ready, and document your experience.
• UA Regional Strategy: Discuss appropriate mechanisms for promoting UA adoption at the local, regional, and national levels.

Events can be held at either the local or national level (largely focusing on a community within a country), or the regional level (involving multiple regional and national organizations from different countries in a region).

For more details on UA Day event formats, including links to relevant materials, see the section on Event Support below.

Those interested in organizing a UA Day event must submit an event proposal through the UA Day Event Proposal Form by 11 October 2024 (Deadline extended to 18 October 2024). Submissions should specify any support needs for your event. The list of UA Day events will be announced by mid-November 2024.

A full calendar of UA Day 2025 events will be published in the coming months at this web page, which can also be accessed through the link https://universalacceptance.day.

If you are considering submitting a proposal for a UA adoption or UA academic curricula event, please be aware of the following requirements:

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.

UA adoption events require advance work to be done by each event organizer’s technical team in order to complete one of the following tasks:

• Make your organization’s website UA-ready by supporting all domain names, including IDNs, and internationalized email addresses in web forms
• Update an email server to support sending to and receiving emails from internationalized email addresses
• Update a mobile application to accept all domain names, including IDNs, and internationalized email addresses

Completion of one of these tasks will be followed by an online demonstration by the event organizer’s technical team in order to qualify for the UA adoption event. UA Adoption Event Requirements should be demonstrated by 28 February 2025. Organizers unable to complete the adoption task may be eligible for holding a UA technical training event, with reduced funding.

ICANN may provide limited support for UA Day events.

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.

• UA Day 2025: Events
• UA Day 2024: Report; Events; Call for Proposals
• UA Day 2023: Report; Events; Call for Proposals