Re: Henry Luce Foundation Grant to Unicode in Support of Encoding Tangut

 |status changed to become a non-profit charity foundation dedicated to
 |wordlwide promotion of education and culture. Thanks.

Oh -- that would be adorable!

--steffen

attached mail follows:

Is the Unicode Consortium allowed to receive dedicated grants like a public
foundation under US law ?

And if so, how does this conform with the UTC working policies ? I suppose
that the Henry Luce Foundation (HLF) will monitor the progresses (to
provide payments) but will it influence the agenda and mean that the Tangut
encoding will be accelerated, using inputs whose sources will come from
only from this Foundation or the UCB SEI ? Can this acceleration be
compatible with ISO WG2 agenda and other national interests ?

So why the HLF did not simply join the UTC with normal membership to
participate directly in the encoding process but without more rights to fix
the working agenda ? Is this a new kind (of UTC membership (and more
powerful, even if it does not include vote rights...) ?

The recent announcement causes some questions. because this changes the
current practices. The Unicode Consortium for now is still registered as a
commercial organization which can then only deliver some limited services
in exachange of a payment (such services include membership fees, sales of
publications, training programs, participations to live events, and so
on...)

But this may be a sign that the Unicode Consortium is about to have its own
status changed to become a non-profit charity foundation dedicated to
wordlwide promotion of education and culture. Thanks. But this should be
clear, and some status will have to be changed to be compatible with US law
about non-profit charities.

We've seen another sign of such evolution by Unicode opening its repository
of working documents. But the main evolutions would include more open
membership conditions, and non discrimination between members. It would
change radically the working methods. Or may be it is just the UTC that
will become a foundation, founded by grants from the Consortium and for
other organizations.

The recent announcement is then very intrigating about how the Consortium
will work for the future, it's probably unavoidable that it will become a
foundation, when almost all commercial needs have been solved and most
remaining issues are about either:

- rare scripts or historic script (whose usage will likely never reach a
point of commercial profitability)

- complex text-handling algorithms based on heuristics which have many
exceptions and many competing algorothms for various uses, so that they
will become standards with lots of difficulties or the winning standard or
some algorithms will not come from Unicode but from other working groups
(commercial or collaborative open-sourced).

Do we expect then 'The Unicode Consoritum, Inc." to be dissolved later and
replaced by "The Unicode Foundation" which could emerge soon, first in
parallel to the Consortium (and possibly grouping the efforts currently
made in the CLDR TC, the UTC, the BSD SEI, and other cultural foundations
including the Wikimedia Foundation, or Unesco and similar international
agencies) ? Will that help receive dedicated public grants from government
sources or from the general public (with possible tax deduction) ? And how
will the current policies be enforced (notably stability policies) ?

2013/9/16 Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>

> Is the Unicode Consortium allowed to receive dedicated grants like a
> public foundation under US law ?
>
> And if so, how does this conform with the UTC working policies ? I suppose
> that the Henry Luce Foundation (HLF) will monitor the progresses (to
> provide payments) but will it influence the agenda and mean that the Tangut
> encoding will be accelerated, using inputs whose sources will come from
> only from this Foundation or the UCB SEI ? Can this acceleration be
> compatible with ISO WG2 agenda and other national interests ?
>
> So why the HLF did not simply join the UTC with normal membership to
> participate directly in the encoding process but without more rights to fix
> the working agenda ? Is this a new kind (of UTC membership (and more
> powerful, even if it does not include vote rights...) ?
>
>
>
> 2013/9/16 <announcements_at_unicode.org>
>
> **
>> The Consortium is very pleased to announce the generous grant made by the Henry
>> Luce Foundation <https://www.hluce.org/asia.aspx> to support progress on
>> encoding Tangut. The Luce Foundation has made a one-time grant to the
>> Unicode Consortium to support a December 2013 meeting to further progress
>> the Tangut script for its eventual incorporation into the Unicode Standard
>> and the associated ISO/IEC 10646 International Standard. The meeting will
>> bring together scholars of Tangut and experts in the character encoding
>> process to agree on the character repertoire for this large and complex
>> script. Work on this grant is directed by Dr. Deborah Anderson, Technical
>> Director of the Consortium and the Project Leader of the UC Berkeley's
>> Script Encoding Initiative.
>>
>>
>> http://unicode-inc.blogspot.com/2013/09/henry-luce-foundation-grant-to-unicode.html
>>
>>
>
Received on Mon Sep 16 2013 - 16:07:30 CDT