[UA-discuss] Question for UASG Chair candidates: what are strategic obstacles blocking UA?

[Satish Babu]

Hi Jim and all

Thanks for your question. I'm speaking as a part of the UA community since
its inception in 2015, and also as someone who had the good fortune to work
with the founding visionaries of UASG (including Ram Mohan, who appears to
have coined the phrase 'Universal Acceptance' and also the three 'Laws' of
UA).

Here are my thoughts on the strategic obstacles that are inhibiting the
goal of Universal Acceptance. I'm not attempting to enumerate the obstacles
themselves, but these are 'meta' thoughts on the approach towards obstacles.

At the outset, I'd like to share that the UA Tech WG has been working on a
survey to address this exact question. Over the next couple of months, we
will be approaching the community with this survey, and at the end of it,
we will have a set of answers from a cross-section of our community. What
follows are my personal thoughts, and I'm not getting into details because
I do not want to bias the survey.

Second, I'd stress the need for coherent, consistent, and impactful
messaging to all the relevant stakeholders. The UA Day certainly addresses
this aspect, but this is the first time we are doing the UA Day. The seeds
that we plant through this and following UA Days in different parts of the
world will, over a period of time, build awareness, motivation, and
hopefully, action.

Third, we have had some success in identifying a set of actionable points
for each stakeholder group, such as language communities, tech companies,
open-source communities, governments, and academia. The survey will help us
to further refine these action items so that we can act on them. For
instance, advocacy with Governments on creating enabling policies would be
a useful thing to do.

Fourth, we now have some experience--and modest success--in strategies for
mitigating and remediating specific UA gaps. We would need to further
refine these and possibly identify more such strategies.

Finally, we need to work on demand-side aspects of UA, in terms of
stimulating demand for UA-ready applications and services, perhaps through
highlighting success stories.

There are probably many more ideas that the UA community could discuss and
operationalize. We have miles to go on our quest.

Wishing everyone a very successful UA Day!!


With kind regards






satish

On Thu, Mar 23, 2023 at 6:36 AM Jim DeLaHunt <list+uasg at jdlh.com> wrote:

> Satish Babu and Anil Kumar Jain:
>
> Thank you for offering yourselves as candidates to be the next chair of
> the UASG. Both of you are clearly committed to Universal Acceptance. Both
> of you have a track record of working diligently to achieve that goal. I
> applaud that.
>
> Before I vote, I would appreciate reading a brief summary of your thoughts
> on this question:
>
> What are the most important strategic obstacles blocking Universal
> Acceptance currently?
>
> Please copy ua-discuss on your reply. Others might be interested in your
> thoughts. And, it might spark an interesting discussion on the list.
>
> I understand that we have until 2023-03-27 02:59 UTC to vote. I hope that
> I might see your replies before then. I realise that you are probably both
> busy with the preparations for UA Day, so there is not time for a long and
> detailed reply. Something brief is fine.
>
> Thank you, and best regards,
>     —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada
>
> --
>     --Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh at jdlh.com     http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
>       multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, Canada
>
>
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