[UA-Tech] Survey on Universal Acceptance Strategy - next steps?

[Jim DeLaHunt]

UA Tech Working Group Colleagues:

The agenda for our 22 Jan 2024 WG meeting has an item, "Reviewing the UA 
Strategy Survey Results and discuss how to narrate and what to include 
in the report before publishing."  I expect that I will miss that 
meeting, so I want to share my thoughts with you by email.

My understanding is that the results we have are summarised in this 
Google Doc[1],

    Survey on Universal Acceptance Strategy
    Technology Working Group Survey Report
    9 December 2023
    <https://docs.google.com/document/d/13BnGOkrrUom57spCJA2EgXKtQ89451nS/edit>

I understand that that report is the only data which has been 
circulated. I have not seen a raw data file.

Here are my thoughts on how to narrate and what to include.

The report should address the original purpose of the survey. This is 
given in the UASG FY22 Action Plan, task T5[2]:

> Identify the big picture UA challenges as of 2022 and issue 
> recommendations for the UASG
So, the main focus of the report should be to list the big picture UA 
challenges which the survey respondents reported. The goal is to help 
UASG arrive at a consensus about what are the obstacles to UA adoption, 
and what strategy over several years will contribute to overcoming those 
obstacles.

Collating and grouping the responses to Question 2, "what are the three 
main impediments to achieving UA?" will probably be the most helpful.

It is also helpful to describe solutions as well as problems. So, it 
would be helpful for the report to describe what ideas respondents have 
to overcome obstacles. These can be found in the responses to Question 
3, "how best can we overcome the impediments you have identified?". And, 
it will be helpful to report on the benefits which follow from achieving 
UA. These can be found in the responses to Question 1, "what are the 
three main benefits that will likely result from achieving UA?".

There might be useful information which can be collected from Questions 
4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. I am not sure. Most of these questions 
asked respondents to choose among options which we wrote and presented 
to them. The quality of the answers will be heavily affected by how well 
we did at crafting useful options.

It seems to me that the report should have a section describing the 
methodology, including how the survey was administered (as a series of 
web forms), when the invitations were sent, how many people were invited 
to respond, etc. The full text of the survey questions and the possible 
answers or text fields should be included as an appendix.

It seems to me that the report should have a section summarising the 
respondents: how many there were, when they responded, and some of their 
characteristics as reported in responses to Question 5, "Length of time 
you have been associated with UA", Question 6, "Roles you have played in 
UA", and Question 7, "Primary Stakeholder group you have been involved in.

It would probably be helpful to have a section on next steps to take, 
based on the survey. I do not know how hard it will be for us to agree 
on what to say on next steps. So I believe we should focus on making a 
draft report which tells what we learned from the survey. Then, when we 
have that, see if we can agree on what to say about next steps. If we 
can agree, then add the next steps as an extra section of the report.

We might decide that we need access to the raw data, not just the 
processed summaries in the Dec 9th report. For instance, Question 3 asks 
for responses based on each person's responses to Question 2.  The Dec 
9th report does not correlate each individual's responses to these two 
questions. They are separate aggregations. Looking at the raw data might 
let us see correlated answers. However, there might be privacy concerns 
about sharing the raw data widely. We might need to designate a few 
people to look at the raw data and make a report on correlated answers 
which preserves privacy.

We might also want to look at the raw data to correlate answers with the 
respondents' characteristics. For instance, if we see two very different 
main impediments reported, we might want to see if people associated 
with UA for a long time had different answers than thos associated for a 
short time.

I think it will be difficult to do these summaries in setting of a 
Working Group meeting.  What I can imagine working is that a few 
individuals volunteer to summarise parts of the survey by themselves. 
They send their summaries to the WG email list. There might be some 
productive discussion on the list. Then, in a WG meeting, we can review 
those individual contributions and agree how to combine them into a report.

I hope this helps the working group figure out next steps for this survey.

Best regards,
     —Jim DeLaHunt

[1] Survey on Universal Acceptance Strategy, 2023-12-09, 
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/13BnGOkrrUom57spCJA2EgXKtQ89451nS/edit>
[2] Action Plan for Universal Acceptance of Domain Names and Email 
Addresses, FY22: July 2021 - June 2022, 2021-07-27 
<https://uasg.tech/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/UASG-FY22-Action-Plan-20210727.pdf>

-- 
     --Jim DeLaHunt,jdlh at jdlh.com      http://blog.jdlh.com/  (http://jdlh.com/)
       multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, Canada
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