Thank you for your interest in contributing to this project. 👏🏾 🎊 🎉
Image source: uasg.tech
- Aims and Objectives
- Background
- Why Univeral Acceptance
- Resources and how you can contribute
- Partners and Supporters
- About Us and Contacts
Our project would like to contribute to Universal Acceptance (UA) efforts, from a Ugandan and East African perspective by creating awareness and sharing technical training content with policy/decision makers, software developers, website owners, researchers, technology enthusiasts, Internet end users, open source communities, among others, to understand UA and why it matters. At the intersection of UA and data science, we hope to work with the open data community to build a repository of resources to promote the adoption of new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and updating existing ones to allow more language scripts.
Our aim is to develop a toolkit that can support these efforts and write a policy brief that will be used as an advocacy tool to inform policy. We hope that this can influence national and industry digital inclusion projects to promote local content and multiple language scripts.
This README explains the Universal Acceptance Project in Uganda, what inspired us to start and how you can get involved.
For any device to communicate with another on the Internet, it needs a unique identifier - a name or an Internet Protocol (IP) address. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) community develops policies that allow these identifiers to work well. Until 2010, the global Domain Name System (DNS) only allowed Top Level Domains (TLDs) which are in the Latin script. The DNS then expanded to include Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) for country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) and domain names for other TLDs. However, many language scripts and writing styles are used around the world, many of which are currently not supported by web browsers, email clients and software applications. This is where Universal Acceptance (UA) comes in.
UA helps to remove technical barriers for users, meaning that all TLDs should be able to work within all software and email applications regardless of the language script or number of characters. It is a foundational requirement for a truly multilingual Internet to remove linguistic barriers for accessing the Internet by allowing people to use native/indigenous languages and in turn bringing more people online.
According to the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) country readiness report (2020), the goal of UA is for these email addresses 测试1@server.technology and السعودية.رسيل@دون to have the same rate of acceptance as user@test.org. However, many organisations and businesses have not yet updated their systems to make this possible. In 2020, 9.7% of email servers were potentially configured to support email addresses in local languages and scripts. Chinese and Arabic are among the top spoken languages globally, yet only 11% of the top 1,000 websites globally support email addresses in these languages.
There are over 40 languages spoken in Uganda and over 140 spoken in East and Central Africa. Language has been named as one of the barriers of connecting the unconnected yet it would give the world’s population an opportunity to access the Internet. Local language domain names can help to support the creation and access to local language content and email addresses.
Please take a look our Open Canvas to give you an overview of the project.
You are invited to contribute to this collection of toolkit, reports, papers and other resources from indivdduals, ICANN and other organisations. We are currently collected them in this resources folder.
Other resources:
- Project Tasks
- Activities and Events
- We are planing a UA webinar series 2021-2022 titled "Demystifying Universal Acceptance: What does a multilingual Internet look like?"
- Project Code of Conduct
- Project maintenance
The project is licensed under the MIT license for software/code related content and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) for non-software/code related content. See details here.
We believe that Universal Acceptance implementation requires a multistakeholder effort. We are grateful to our partners and supporters.
Organisers
Partners and Supporters
This repository is maintained by a team of technologists, researchers, tech policy experts, activists, UA enthusists, among others, working in organisations including:
Access Plus is a Ugandan based organisation that aims at improving livelihoods by promoting inclusive access to and use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the Internet to contribute to solving economic barriers. We do this by improving access to knowledge, information exchange and building technical capacity to use these technologies.
The team
- Sarah Kiden is a public interest technologist and researcher, working at the intersection of technology, communities and design. She is a Marie Curie Research Fellow on Open Design of Trusted Things (OpenDoTT), a joint programme between Northumbria University and Mozilla. She is currently exploring the possibilities of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies for community building, and focusing on community fridges and food sharing initiatives.
- Lillian Achom believes that an ICT-empowered society is an opportunity for employment, wealth creation and therefore economic growth and better livelihoods. Lillian’s favorite is teaching women and girls in rural communities the benefits of internet & how to use smart phones and, mentoring young girls to take up careers in ICT.
- Esther Patricia Akello is a technologist, who is passionate about application development and finding solutions for socio-economic problems. She is an entrepreneur, expert in managing ICT Projects and start-ups, and one of the founding Partners of AccessPlus an organization focused on promoting STEM careers for girls and extending ICT services to underserved communities. She is an Application Developer at the Bank of Uganda and holds an MSc in Information Systems and BSc in Computer Science.
- Mutegeki Cliff Agaba is a technology enthusiast and digital entrepreneur. He is the Vice President of the Internet Society Uganda Chapter and formerly the Secretary for Gender and Disabilities, where he also served as the chapter training coordinator for the recently concluded Internet Society Chapter training program. He is also serving as a member of the Universal Acceptance Communications Working Group under the umbrella of ICANN.
- Joseph Rugasira
TL;DR
Check out our zine here.
Please feel free to contribute to the project and reach out on email: project(dash)team(at)accesspluss(dot)org. We look forward to working with you!