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The Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization originally founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard, which specifies the representation of text in 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 cooperates with W3C and ISO and has liaison status "C" with ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC2/WG2, which is responsible for refining the specification and expanding the character set of ISO/IEC 10646.

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 Common Locale Data Repository. Major versions of the Unicode Standard are published in book form.

Members of the Consortium include major computer corporations, software producers, database vendors, 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 maintains a set of official policies with regards to patents, the stability of the Standard, and Unicode's trademarks, logo and copyright material. It also makes available many Unicode Encoded logos that can be freely displayed on web sites to indicate that a page (or collection of pages) is encoded in Unicode

There are three consortium committees: two technical committees and the editorial committee.

Unicode Technical Committee. Chair Lisa Moore, Vice-Chair Eric Muller
Responsible for the creation, maintenance, and quality of the Unicode Standard, and related software globalization standards and documents.
CLDR Technical Committee. Chair Mark Davis, Vice-Chair Deborah Goldsmith
Responsible for the Common Locale Data Repository, and related software localization standards and documents.
Editorial Committee. Chair Ken Whistler.
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.