NGOs, Universities, and Other Institutions
Introduction. The Unicode Consortium has worked with institutions from around the world to further the support of languages and text in computing. Many have contributed to the addition of new characters to the Standard; others have contributed to the development of Unicode CLDR locales. The Consortium's engagement with a few NGOs, universities, and other institutions is highlighted below. We would like to expand our information on the use of Unicode by hearing how other of our member organizations use and benefit from the Unicode Consortium's standards and projects—let us hear from you.
The Consortium welcomes the continued engagement of NGOs and other institutions to participate in the ongoing work of the Consortium, whether through extending locale data, proposing the addition of new characters and scripts, or by encouraging the addition of new translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR in Unicode project).
Many resources of interest to institutions are listed in the side navigation bar. These include books, articles, case studies, ways to get involved and more.
Development Organizations. In 2009, the Consortium partnered with ANLoc, the African Network for Localization, a project sponsored by Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to help extend modern computing on the African continent through creating new and enhanced locales for Africa. This partnership resulted in the creation of 54 new locales for languages used in 26 nations across Africa.
The Unicode Consortium has also engaged with the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), to support them with their transliteration and character set conversion efforts. UNGEGN is interested in the use of the International Components for Unicode (ICU), open source software that provides support they need for Unicode transliteration and Unicode normalization. The use of Unicode helps the UNGEGN experts to streamline their work in advising the UN member states that meet regularly to establish standards for compiling national gazetteers and for the names of geographic locations used by the UN.
Universities and Research Institutions. The Consortium has engaged with many educational institutions and research projects to ensure that their research can use software based on Unicode-defined characters.
For example, the Consortium worked with the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Project, University of California, Irvine to encode punctuation and annotation marks so that scholars studying historic Greek manuscripts can make use of readily available word processing software products. Similarly, the Consortium engaged with the the Initiative for Cuneiform Encoding (ICE), Johns Hopkins University, to encode cuneiform characters in support of their research, and also engaged with Egyptian experts at the the International Association for Coptic Studies, the Egyptian Antiquities Organization to complete the full encoding of the Coptic script.
Consortium Membership. Organizations may also choose to become members or to establish liaison relationships to enable close cooperation and participation. A partial list of organizations that have established formal relationships with the Unicode Consortium include:
NGOs
Universities
Industry Consortia
Standards Organizations
Other Organizations
![[Unicode]](http://www.unicode.org/webscripts/logo60s2.gif){kind=small}
Education