Re: Proposed new characters updated in Pipeline Table

2011/8/14 Petr Tomasek <tomasek_at_etf.cuni.cz>:
>> Submitting a doc to UTC is a basic requirement. The issue also needs to make it onto the agenda of a UTC meeting, and it helps to have a champion to make sure that happens and that can be available to discuss the issue with the UTC. These things are much easier if you are a member of the consortium (cost is as little as $35/yr for students).
>
> Which may still be not negligible sum for some people, especially not US
> citizens...

In addition, not a lot people will stay students for long enough to
participate to an internationalization and standardization process
which requires efforts, discussions and participation for years. So
even if a student starts being involved in the process, will he have
the time and money to continue his participation, once he no longer
has the student status, if he then does not work for a company
supporting his initiated project?

The price for individuals passionnated on a subject for years will
soon be significant enough to discourage his participation with so
little benefit (when his project will not advance for years,
constantly waiting for others to include the project in their working
agenda, and not constantly postoning their decisions).

That's why there are probably better ways for individuals to
participate than joining the UTC directly. The Script Encoding
Initiative (SEI) is probably better fitted for such participation,
because it is much less costly, even if this means that the
participation will be only indirect, by the participation of the SEI
representant at UTC, and a more stable source of financement (and a
more independant schedule in the agendas). I just hope that the UTC
better welcomes the participation by non-profit organizations that
have independant support from their citizen participants, not
individually bound to the UTC membership terms.

As well, there is still clearly a lack of ways for independant
non-profit organizations to participate, if they are not in US (in my
opinion, the Consortium still lacks regional bureaux to make the
liaison needed with local organizations, and simplify the contacts,
but also to get valuable input and discussion from those local
non-profit organizations, that are also not supported by their
national ISO representant).

More most people looking at how the UTC works, the work being
performed there seems too much opaque (and there are even too many
documents whose access are restricted, notably when time comes where a
proposal gets formalized and before it comes to an important ballot,
whose result will be impossible to change later, and people will
discover later that there was a clear lack of input from concerned
parties).

So in my opinion, the UTC should really seek into designating, among
its own members, those that will lead some regional bureaux (at least
one on each continent, but certainly one in each country/region where
there's a need for unencoded scripts or badly supported languages,
notably in Cameroun and Indonesia), with a more open participation
from non-members in those regions. Some UTC members are already
present in those regions, but do they accept local open participations
in their own institutions, when they are in fact only (most often)
commercial companies whose focus is in fact different from "normal"
individual users, or religious organizations interested mostly in some
kind of litterature and with a non-neutral religious or political
opinion?

Thanks, we have at least this mailing list, but not a lot is going
through the list, except that we are often informed, at a very late
stage, about which decisions have been made. (the only open
participation is about character properties or algorithms that are not
stabilized, for which we get a chance to particpate by the "public
reviews", with limited interaction or solutions to propose, and lots
of complications introduced to maintain some backward compatibility
with past encoding errors, or unjustified disunifications, or overkill
unifications).

-- Philippe.
Received on Mon Aug 15 2011 - 11:26:28 CDT