2011/8/14 Petr Tomasek <[email protected]>: >> Submitting a doc to UTC is a basic requirement. The issue also needs to make >> it onto the agenda of a UTC meeting, and it helps to have a champion to make >> sure that happens and that can be available to discuss the issue with the >> UTC. These things are much easier if you are a member of the consortium >> (cost is as little as $35/yr for students). > > Which may still be not negligible sum for some people, especially not US > citizens...
In addition, not a lot people will stay students for long enough to participate to an internationalization and standardization process which requires efforts, discussions and participation for years. So even if a student starts being involved in the process, will he have the time and money to continue his participation, once he no longer has the student status, if he then does not work for a company supporting his initiated project? The price for individuals passionnated on a subject for years will soon be significant enough to discourage his participation with so little benefit (when his project will not advance for years, constantly waiting for others to include the project in their working agenda, and not constantly postoning their decisions). That's why there are probably better ways for individuals to participate than joining the UTC directly. The Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) is probably better fitted for such participation, because it is much less costly, even if this means that the participation will be only indirect, by the participation of the SEI representant at UTC, and a more stable source of financement (and a more independant schedule in the agendas). I just hope that the UTC better welcomes the participation by non-profit organizations that have independant support from their citizen participants, not individually bound to the UTC membership terms. As well, there is still clearly a lack of ways for independant non-profit organizations to participate, if they are not in US (in my opinion, the Consortium still lacks regional bureaux to make the liaison needed with local organizations, and simplify the contacts, but also to get valuable input and discussion from those local non-profit organizations, that are also not supported by their national ISO representant). More most people looking at how the UTC works, the work being performed there seems too much opaque (and there are even too many documents whose access are restricted, notably when time comes where a proposal gets formalized and before it comes to an important ballot, whose result will be impossible to change later, and people will discover later that there was a clear lack of input from concerned parties). So in my opinion, the UTC should really seek into designating, among its own members, those that will lead some regional bureaux (at least one on each continent, but certainly one in each country/region where there's a need for unencoded scripts or badly supported languages, notably in Cameroun and Indonesia), with a more open participation from non-members in those regions. Some UTC members are already present in those regions, but do they accept local open participations in their own institutions, when they are in fact only (most often) commercial companies whose focus is in fact different from "normal" individual users, or religious organizations interested mostly in some kind of litterature and with a non-neutral religious or political opinion? Thanks, we have at least this mailing list, but not a lot is going through the list, except that we are often informed, at a very late stage, about which decisions have been made. (the only open participation is about character properties or algorithms that are not stabilized, for which we get a chance to particpate by the "public reviews", with limited interaction or solutions to propose, and lots of complications introduced to maintain some backward compatibility with past encoding errors, or unjustified disunifications, or overkill unifications). -- Philippe.
