Suppose there's someone who has been working with the ESC for a while and whose frustration level has passed the boiling point. Let's call this person "X". X has become so angry that X is distilling recent experiences into an exposé article for submission to the media. The media outlet, if responsible journalists, would fact-check the article. Would the fact-checking find proof, or would it be determined that it is simply a, uh, dissing contest between two or more personalities? (If the latter, one of the tabloids might buy the article. They just *love* dissing contests.)
The original thread includes some sweeping allegations concerning competence and integrity, but offers no specific examples. Even though many people do it daily, it's best not to make judgments without evidence. A list member kindly sent me links to a pair of documents. L2/17-147 http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17147-emoji-subcommittee.pdf L2/17-192 http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17192-response-cmts.pdf The first one, L2/17-147 (by West, Buff, and Päper), is a request for more ESC transparency. It raises a couple of legitimate concerns: (1) requests complete public documentation of all incoming submissions, and (2) requests a public roster of ESC members. The requests seem reasonable. The second one, L2/17-192 (by Davis and Edberg), rejects the first one. A superficial analysis might persuade someone that the ESC does things the way they like to do things and are going to continue to do things, so neener-neener. But if we examine the reasoning behind L2/17-192, it does make some sense. For (1), there's too many submissions and the vast majority of them are D.O.A.. Why spend resources documenting non-starters? L2/17-192 goes on to explain the way viable submissions become public. For (2), which the ESC rejected first, the underlying reasoning is clearly stated. The roster is in a perpetual state of flux, there is no fixed membership, there is no membership list. Putting aside any obvious advantages anonymity offers over accountability, any committee with a constantly shifting membership is unstable by definition. Why would any committee want to make its instability a matter of public record? Putting aside any snide humor, it does appear that the ESC responds to requests/suggestions and is willing to work with submitters. (Based on one example, at least.) One one hand, there's a group who is interested in exploiting the emoji ranges to advance corporate commercial concerns. On another hand, there are emoji enthusiasts who want the sterling reputation of excellence Unicode has earned to continue far into the future. There's got to be some common ground here. Why not shake those hands, find that common ground, and explore it together? And have some fun while doing it. Aren't the emoji supposed to be fun?
