Membership

What does it mean for the Unicode Consortium to be a membership organization?

The Consortium is entirely funded by memberships and donations. Several types of membership are available, depending on what kind of support and involvement you want to have. Memberships are extended to corporations, educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and individuals, as well as governmental bodies and other standards-developing organizations.

Q: What kinds of membership are there?

Membership levels include Full, Supporting, Associate, Individual, Student and Liaison.

Q: Who can vote on Consortium decisions?

Full members are able to vote in the Consortium annual meetings, and on technical issues. For complete details of which types of membership have which voting privileges, see Membership Levels.

Q: Who can vote on technical committee decisions?

Full, and Supporting members are able to vote on technical committees. See Membership Levels and Fees for details. (Technical voting on CLDR data issues is separate, and follows a special process which is explained on the CLDR pages.)

Q: How does one become a member?

See Why Join Unicode and see the Consortium's contact information if you want to talk to us about it. Individual and student members can join or renew easily by filling in the online membership form and paying the annual dues. For other levels of membership there is an online application form.

Q: How will joining the Unicode Consortium as a voting member add value for my company?

Your company or organization has a say in developing and extending the standards and data that are core to all software internationalization. This reaches from the Unicode encoding, to encoding new types of characters such as emoji, to all of the related standards (collation, security, regular expressions, international domain names, etc.), and to the standard data for locales (CLDR). You can help to keep stable the parts that you need to be stable, and extend the parts that you need to be extended.

Your engineers and planners can get the latest first-hand information about what is coming in new releases of these standards and data and how to work with existing releases. They also have the benefit of working with—and learning from—others who have similar needs and interests.

You are also making a public statement of support for this infrastructure that underlies the web and all modern software development.

Q: What benefits does Unicode Consortium membership have for academics?

Membership in the Unicode Consortium allows students, faculty, researchers, staff, and librarians to directly take part in the development of the Unicode Standard and other Unicode projects, such as CLDR. Members can participate in discussions about new characters and scripts, and have a say in issues that impact their academic research, the development of pedagogical tools, and cataloging.

Q: How does individual membership in the Unicode Consortium work?

Individual membership gives you full access to email lists and technical committee meetings, allowing you to contribute to the ongoing development of the Unicode Standard. A discounted rate is available for students.

Q: Are there ways to participate in the Unicode work without becoming a member?

Certainly. The Unicode Consortium actively seeks input on various technical issues through a process of public review, and welcomes volunteers in many aspects of its work. Many people also find attending the yearly International and Unicode Conference to be a valuable way to connect with others in the field.