On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 1:53 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.orgwrote:
I'm not sure who would be in charge of this, but I think it would be useful if the WMF was a liaison member of the Unicode Constortium: http://unicode.org/consortium/memblogo.html
This body makes all sorts of important decisions about the Unicode standard—decisions that affects many aspects of our projects. If an issue were to come up that adversely affected us, we would not have a formal way to object at the moment. Being a liason member gives us official standing with the organization, allowing us to participate alongside Google, Apple, and Microsoft in any Unicode-related discussions that are important to us.
Other open sources projects that are currently liaison members: The GNOME Foundation The Mozilla Project OpenOffice.org
I'm not sure if there is any fee for becoming a liaison member. The instructions simply say to "contact the Unicode Office for details". Would it be worth contacting them to find out?
I think that'd be worth doing; I had a great chat with Michael Everson at our Berlin meetup (Michael's been involved in lots of Unicode standardization stuff over the years and has many tales to tell :) and it definitely sounds like it would be useful for us to be a little more on the inside at times to help push on requirements for specific language support, or making sure that concerns about labeling, character types, and normalization (shudder) get looked at and addressed.
In comparison, we have a couple of folks who keep an eye on some of the W3C / WHATWG lists that are working on the HTML 5 specifications -- these are mostly open lists which made it easier for particularly interested individuals like Aryeh & Tim to pop on either for specific issues or just as voracious list readers. ;)
Unicode's development has traditionally been a little more closed and old-fashioned -- not a horrible thing for something as delicate as the universal character set! -- but it does mean that if we want to be involved, we need to work with the system to make sure that we're heard.
I'll see if we can figure out who gets jurisdiction internally on this. :)
-- brion