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The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit corporation devoted to developing, maintaining, and promoting software internationalization standards and data, particularly the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards. The Unicode Consortium actively develops standards in the area of internationalization including defining the behavior and relationships between Unicode characters. The Consortium works closely with W3C and ISO—in particular with ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC2/WG2, which is responsible for maintaining ISO/IEC 10646, the International Standard synchronized with the Unicode Standard.

The publications of the Unicode Consortium include The Unicode Standard, with its Annexes and Character Database, Unicode Technical Standards and Reports, Unicode Technical Notes and the Unicode Locales project, the Common Locale Data Repository.

Members of the Consortium include major computer corporations, software producers, database vendors, government ministries, research institutions, international agencies, various user groups, and interested individuals. A white paper outlining the overall value of a Unicode membership to an organization is available separately.

The Consortium's Directors and Officers come from a variety of organizations, representing a wide spectrum of text-encoding and computing applications. 

The Consortium has the status of a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. Donations to the Consortium are tax-deductible to the extent allowed for by law. The Consortium bylaws are publicly available.

The Consortium maintains a set of official policies with regards to patents, the stability of the Standard, and Unicode's trademarks, logo and copyright material.

There are five consortium committees: four technical committees and the editorial committee.

Unicode Technical Committee
Responsible for the creation, maintenance, and quality of the Unicode Standard, and related software globalization standards and documents.
Unicode CLDR Technical Committee
Responsible for the Unicode Locales Project, the Common Locale Data Repository, and related software localization standards and documents.
Unicode ICU Technical Committee
Responsible for the ICU (International Components for Unicode) Project.
Unicode Localization Interoperability Technical Committee
The ULI-TC provides needed data interchange formats for localization-related assets, with a focus on XLIFF, SRX, and TMX.
Unicode Editorial Committee
Responsible for editing the Consortium's publications and web pages.

The Unicode Consortium sponsors an occasional Bulldog award given to various personalities for their "outstanding personal contributions to the philosophy and dissemination of the Unicode Standard".

A number of Unicode members and volunteers are active in organizing periodic Internationalization and Unicode Conferences, which are conducted by an independent conference organizer under license from the Unicode Consortium.

W3C HTML Validator

The Unicode Consortium is committed to standards. Periodically the Unicode web pages are run through HTML validation to assure interoperability and syntactic validity. The W3C logo indicates that our pages validate as HTML 4.0 Transitional. Click the logo to visit the W3C validation pages.