Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways

HEEEEELLLLLLOOOO friends of Unicode! HaVE yoU HEard? 🚨🚨This year’s keynote speaker is Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist and bestselling author of the 2019 book, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. ✍️ You ✍️ may ✍️ also ✍️ know ✍️ Gretchen ✍️ from ✍️ her ✍️ column ✍️ about ✍️ internet ✍️ language ✍️ in ✍️ WIRED. If you aren’t familiar withGretchen’s book it includes great insights of how language and technology evolves! Don’t miss this unique opportunity to hear from her in person. (♥ω♥*)

Her talk, “Taking Playfulness Seriously—When character sets are used in unexpected ways,” explores those trailblazing language disrupters, who aren’t checking out the Oxford English dictionary or asking themselves, “What would my college English prof do about this comma?” You know who you are! 👀 She’ll discuss all the creative ways real-life netizens playfully create ASCII art out of text or combine emoji to convey new meanings, as well as the problems that arise when these kinds of creative uses clash with technical tools behind the scenes that aren’t expecting the unexpected—and what some solutions might look like.

In addition to Gretchen McCulloch, the conference offers Unicode tutorials, talks and panels on internationalization, web design, emoji, indigenous languages, historical scripts, and more. Of course, the conference also includes plenty of networking opportunities, as well as a special celebration of the Unicode Consortium’s 30th anniversary!

See What’s Happening at IUC 45

For thirty years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. Join us in Santa Clara to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Join expert practitioners and industry leaders as they present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency of supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Join us for the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 45, October 13-15, 2021, Santa Clara, California. To register and learn more, please visit the Internationalization & Unicode Conference website. Object Management Group®, (OMG®) organizes the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences around the world under an exclusive license granted by the Unicode Consortium.

Since its founding, the Unicode Consortium has grown and expanded its charter and scope. We’re embarking on a new chapter in the evolution of the Consortium and are pleased to announce the appointment of Toral Cowieson in the newly-created position of Executive Director & COO.

“We are thrilled to have Toral joining the team,” said Mark Davis, President and cofounder of the Consortium. “She brings a wealth of experience in leadership across non-profits, corporations, and board service. Her recent time at the Internet Society, including as head of Strategy and Impact Measurement, puts Unicode in good stead for this next stage of growth."

In this senior executive position reporting to the Chair of the Board of Directors, Ms. Cowieson will collaborate with the Board, officers, and team to extend the technical mission and impact, set the future agenda and program priorities, and ensure the long-term health and sustainability of the organization.

“Unicode standards are at the heart of how users seamlessly receive and share information across the nearly 22 billion devices around the world. I’m honored and excited to be joining the Consortium at this juncture, and look forward to working with the Board, staff, and the extended Unicode community to advance the mission and have an even greater impact in the years to come,” commented Ms. Cowieson.

In addition to Ms. Cowieson joining as Executive Director, the Consortium is also pleased to announce the following changes:

Board and Other Leadership Updates

Iris Orriss, who joined the Unicode Board in 2019, has been elected as the Treasurer of the Consortium. She is VP of Internationalization, Product Quality, and Product Experience Analytics at Facebook. Ms. Orriss is also Chair of the Board’s Finance and Funding Committee.

Greg Welch, member of the Board since 2013, has been elected as the Secretary of the Consortium and carries forward the excellent work done in this office by Michel Suignard for more than a decade. Mr. Welch is also Chair of the Board’s Governance & Nominating Committee.

Markus Scherer, the Chair of the ICU Technical Committee, has been appointed a Vice President. He is a member of the Google software internationalization team, focusing on the effective use of Unicode and on the development and deployment of cross-product internationalization libraries.

Announcing Unicode Fellows

The Consortium has recently created a new category for distinguished contributors, whose deep, long-term knowledge of internationalization and dedication to work on standards has greatly benefited the Consortium for many years. The Consortium is pleased to announce its two inaugural Unicode Fellows.

Peter Edberg has been named a Unicode Fellow. He has worked on internationalization, text and language support at Apple since 1988. He has been Apple’s representative to the Consortium for many years, and has been actively involved since 2008 with the Unicode CLDR and ICU projects.

Michel Suignard has been named a Unicode Fellow after serving as Secretary for the Unicode Consortium from 2007 to 2020. He worked for more than twenty-five years at Microsoft, where he held various positions in the development and sales divisions, many involving the development of the Unicode Standard. He is currently an independent consultant working on character encoding related matters, such as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and typography. Michel is the code chart editor for the Unicode Standard and is also the project editor of ISO/IEC 10646, which is the ISO standard aligned with the Unicode Standard.

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This week, the Unicode Consortium is excited to celebrate the calendar emoji, 📅, commonly displayed with July 17th. People are the power driving the popularity of emoji through their innovative use of them to share joy, activities, sports, individuality, and so much more.

Celebrate a favorite emoji or character this week by adopting a character! While many characters have been adopted since the program launched in December 2015, hundreds of emoji haven’t been adopted by anyone at any level, including fantastic ones like clapping hands (👏twelfth👏most👏used👏emoji👏), check box (for all your to-do list dreams), and the loudly crying emoji (I’m so proud of you! 😭). Imagine the possible messages you could send with a gift adoption! For example:

• Congratulations!!!!! 🥂
• Love You! 🖤
• Kisses 💋
• Did you see this👇🏽
• Yes, I adopted this face in your name 🥴
• My bad 😳
• Happy Birthday! To 100 more! 🎂

When you celebrate World Emoji Day this week by sponsoring your favorite emoji or another character for yourself or as a gift, your donation helps the non-profit Unicode Consortium support the world’s many languages and make the digital world more inclusive. The Consortium is funded by membership fees and donations from individuals, corporations, and other organizations. Your donations help support the vital work of the Consortium, making modern software and computing systems support the widest range of human languages. The Consortium will use your donation to improve language support and to preserve digital heritage. For more details, see How Donations are Used.

The beta review period for Unicode 14.0 has started. The Unicode Standard is the foundation for all modern software and communications around the world, including all modern operating systems, browsers, laptops, and smart phones-plus the Internet and Web (URLs, HTML, XML, CSS, JSON, etc.). The Unicode Standard, its associated standards, and data form the foundation for CLDR and ICU releases. Thus it is important to ensure a smooth transition to each new version of the standard.

Unicode 14.0 includes a number of changes and 838 new characters. Some of the Unicode Standard Annexes have modifications for Unicode 14.0. Five new scripts have been added in Unicode 14.0. There are also additional emoji characters.

Please review the documentation, adjust your code, test the data files, and report errors and other issues to the Unicode Consortium by July 13, 2021. This will be a slightly shorter review period of only five weeks, so prompt feedback is appreciated. Feedback instructions are on the beta page.

See https://www.unicode.org/versions/beta-14.0.0.html for more information about testing the 14.0.0 beta.

See https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode14.0.0/ for the current draft summary of Unicode 14.0.0.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards.

The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, Microsoft, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Salesforce, SAP, Tamil Virtual Academy, The University of California (Berkeley), Yat Labs, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For a complete member list go to https://home.unicode.org/membership/members/

For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium https://www.unicode.org/contacts.html.

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For over 30 years the Internationalization & Unicode® Conference (IUC) has been the preeminent event highlighting the latest innovations and best practices of global and multilingual software providers. As we navigate the new normal, we invite you to join us in Santa Clara, CA to promote your ideas and experiences working with natural languages, multicultural user interfaces, producing and supporting multinational and multilingual products, linguistic algorithms, applying internationalization across mobile and social media platforms, or advancements in relevant standards.

Trained, Tested, Trusted: Understand best practices in process and among teams reliably delivering high quality global products. Examine how developers build, test, and deploy great global products. Explore technologies for design, localization, multilingual testing, workflow management, and content management.

Expert practitioners and industry leaders present detailed recommendations for businesses looking to expand to new international markets and those seeking to improve time to market and cost-efficiency in supporting existing markets. Recent conferences have provided specific advice on designing software for European countries, Latin America, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, and emerging markets.

Track and Session Topics to Include:

Architecture	Case Studies
Fonts/Emojis	ICU/CLDR
Internationalization	Language Sustainability
Localization	Scripts

Register Today!

About The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode® Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of corporations and organizations, many in the computer and information processing industry. Members include: Adobe, Apple, Emojipedia, Facebook, Google, Government of Bangladesh, Government of India, Microsoft, Netflix, Sultanate of Oman MARA, Salesforce, SAP, Tamil Virtual Academy, The University of California (Berkeley), Yat Labs, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual members. For a complete member list go to https://home.unicode.org/membership/members/ For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium.

About the Event Producer

OMG® is the Event Producer for the Internationalization & Unicode Conferences. OMG is an international, open membership, not-for-profit computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a wide range of technologies and an even wider range of industries. OMG's modeling standards, including the Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®) and Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®), enable powerful visual design, execution and maintenance of software and other processes, including IT Systems Modeling and Business Process Management. OMG's middleware standards and profiles are based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) and support a wide variety of industries. OMG has offices at 109 Highland Avenue, Needham, MA 02494 USA. This email may be considered to be commercial email, an advertisement or a solicitation.

For more information about OMG, visit us online at https://go.omgprograms.org/e/658223/2021-05-19/4hvqrv/283005991?h=Oj2eGlxYpYR7gx1lmU8Rxbrb1HmYWLHAiDyImxZoBI4.

Unicode® ICU4X 0.2 has just been released. This revision improves completeness of the components in ICU4X 0.1 and introduces a number of lower-level utilities.

ICU4X 0.2 adds minimal decimal formatting, time zone formatting, datetime skeleton resolution, and locale canonicalization.

This release comes with new low-level utilities for fixed decimal operations, ICU patterns, and foundational components allowing use of ICU4X from other ecosystems via Foreign Function Interfaces.

Additionally, the ICU4X team released a roadmap and a product requirements document setting sights on a stable 1.0 release.

ICU4X aims to develop a highly modular set of internationalization components for resource-constrained environments.

For details, please see changelog.

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The Unicode Consortium is inviting artists and designers to submit cover design proposals for Version 14.0 of The Unicode Standard, scheduled for publications in September 2021.

The selected cover design will appear on the Unicode Standard 14.0 web pages, in the print-on-demand publications, and in associated promotional literature on the Unicode website. The artist whose design is selected for the cover will receive full credit in the colophon of the publication for which the art is used, and wherever else the design appears, and will receive $700. Two selected runner-up artists will receive $150 apiece.

Please see the announcement web page for requirements and more details.

When you last heard from the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee in April of 2020, the Unicode Consortium had just announced a 6-month delay to Unicode Version 14.0 due to COVID-19. Despite all of this :waves at the world: we’ve been busy.

What’s new? Great question!

During this pause in proposal submissions, the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee consulted with experts, developing a process that more completely reflects our criteria for inclusion in an effort to prioritize globally relevant emoji. We’ve looked for new ways to reconcile the rapid, transient nature of modern communication with the formal, methodical process required by a standards body like the Unicode Consortium.

Moving forward, the proposal review season will be open each year from April 15-August 31. To submit a proposal, first read these Guidelines and fill out this form.

Thanks to all our Unicode Emoji Subcommittee volunteers who made these improvements possible. The world would be without emoji if it weren’t for you!

Looking forward to 2021!
The Unicode Emoji Subcommittee

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