Re: Accessing the WG2 document register

I have been thinking about the current discussion in the Unicode mailing list about a particular ISO committee no longer being allowed to accept proposal documents from individuals, because of a rule change from a higher level within ISO.

I am thinking of how the committee meetings might be different from how they would be if the rules had not been changed and what might not get encoded that might have been encoded had the rule change not happened.

In the short term, the individual contributor is hurt, yet in the long term the document encoding process is hurt and the whole world of information technology may be hurt as potentially good content has been ignored due to discrimination, and a standards document produced that is not as good as it could have been had there not been the discrimination.

Thinking of this I remembered that some years ago, possibly on Channel 4 television news in the UK, there was an item about a lady who had that year won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I am trying to trace who it was and a particular work by her, thus far without success.

There was a work, either a poem or a narrative, about what happened differently at a railway station because she was not there as a passenger that day, as to how what happened was different from what would have happened had she been there.

I cannot be sure but I think that Hungary came into it somewhere, either as a Hungarian lady or a Hungarian railway station.

I opine that it is important when deciding what will be considered for encoding that there is no discrimination about considering encoding proposals. Not only does ignoring contributions cause immediate problems but also there can be second order effects and so on as potential later contributions will not be made as they will not have the original contribution to build upon, and many people may not even realize that the second order effects have taken place.

William Overington

15 June 2015

----Original message----
From : pandey_at_umich.edu
Date : 10/06/2015 - 11:01 (GMTST)
To : babelstone_at_gmail.com
Cc : unicore_at_unicode.org, unicode_at_unicode.org
Subject : Re: Accessing the WG2 document register

Andrew,

Thank you for this detailed investigation. It is truly informative.

As I am considered an ineligible contributor by ISO, um, standards, I hereby withdraw all of my contributions to Unicode, and reflexively to ISO 10646. A list of the contributions that I withdraw is given at:

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~pandey/

Whoever has the task of coordinating with ISO, is that you Michel?, please withdraw all of my contributions.

All the best,
Anshuman
Received on Mon Jun 15 2015 - 02:44:22 CDT