New Unicode Consortium CEO

— Mark Davis, President & Unicode Cofounder


In January 1991 I became the first president of the Unicode Consortium, and in that position have presided over the board of directors since then. I’ve had the honor of occupying those roles for just over a gigasecond now, and it's time for a change.

Over time, it became apparent to me, the Consortium’s other officers, and the Board of Directors that our management model was no longer sufficient for what the organization had become over time, and what it needed to be in the future. So, we began to explore a new, more sustainable governance and management model. And an important part of that was succession planning

Among the first major steps in implementing this model was the hiring of Toral Cowieson as our first Executive Director and COO in 2021. Since then, Toral has helped professionalize the management of the Consortium. Working with the Board and the other Officers, Toral has also contributed to strengthening the Consortium’s governance.

The Board and I have also recognized that, as President, I have effectively occupied two distinct roles — CEO and CTO — and that these two different roles require the full attention of two different people. Accordingly, the Board has decided to split these two roles, formally creating the positions of CEO and CTO, while retiring the title of President.

And as its next step — I am delighted to announce — the Board has elected Toral Cowieson as CEO to replace me.

Toral has brought a wealth of experience in leadership across non-profits, corporations, and board service to Unicode. As executive director, she has connected with the people in the organization, provided thoughtful leadership, and instituted and guided changes in our operations and governance.

I’m not stepping off the stage completely. The Board has re-elected me as Chair of the Board, and elected me to the new position of CTO. I’ll also be continuing as chair of the CLDR technical committee as well as contributing to ICU and the UTC in focused areas.

The Unicode Consortium is the forum for companies, countries and other groups to work together on interoperable standards, code, and data — to support internationalizing software around the world. As a simple example, whenever you glance at the date on your cell phone, the text you see is Unicode characters, is formatted for your language according to CLDR language data (including for English), and uses ICU code libraries to make that all work.

As CTO, my main goal this year will be to work with the board, technical groups, and invited experts to continue maintaining and extending that foundation for so much of the world’s software, while formulating a strategy for meeting upcoming requirements and taking advantage of new technologies.

In addition, I am also pleased to announce some additional changes. I’ve worked extensively with each of these people, and have the fullest confidence that they will do great work in these new roles.

• Peter Constable is a Technical Vice President and the Chair of the UTC. Since 2003, Peter has worked for Microsoft on various projects related to Unicode, internationalization, text display and fonts. He became a Unicode technical director in 2008 and later served as Treasurer.

• Addison Phillips is the new Chair of the Message Formatting Working Group. Addison is also the chair of the W3C Internationalization Working Group and an active participant in the creation of internationalization standards such as Unicode. He and I are co-authors of IETF BCP 47, which is the standard for language and locale identifiers.

• Elango Cheran is the Vice-Chair of the recently formed Community Engagement team and an internationalization engineer at Google. He actively contributes to the ICU and ICU4X projects, and to the MessageFormat Working Group.

Additional information available here:
Unicode Executive Officers
Unicode Fellows, Staff and Support
Unicode Technical Committee Chairs
Unicode Organization Chart

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

---

Support Unicode
To support Unicode’s mission to ensure everyone can communicate in their languages across all devices, please consider adopting a character, making a gift of stock, or making a donation. As Unicode, Inc. is a US-based open source, open standards, non-profit, 501(c)3 organization, your contribution may be eligible for a tax deduction. Please consult with a tax advisor for details.

Unicode Consortium Elects New Directors to its Board

The Consortium is pleased to announce the following Board of Directors election results from its annual Member’s meeting:

Elected to new 3-year board terms:

Brent Getlin, Director of Product Development and General Manager, Fonts and Type, Adobe, Inc.
Brent is the Director of Product Development and General Manager for Adobe Fonts and Type at Adobe. Previously, Brent managed Adobe's mobile gaming engineering and Macromedia Flash video encoder. Brent holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Engineering from Southern Methodist University.

Teresa Marshall, VP of Globalization and Localization, Salesforce, Inc.
As VP of Globalization and Localization, Teresa drives globalization efforts across Salesforce, including internationalization, international product management and localization. She started her career as a German linguist and has held program and operational management positions at a number of Silicon Valley companies as well as academic positions in the field of language translation. Teresa holds a MA in Translation and Interpreting from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Re-elected to another 3-year term on the board:

David Singer, Apple, Inc.
David Singer is the senior engineer who coordinates standards activity for software engineering at Apple. In this role, he serves directly in both technical roles (multimedia systems at MPEG and 3GPP) and strategic roles (Advisory Committee and Advisory Board at the W3C, past Blu-ray Director), and indirectly oversees Apple’s involvement in a wide range of standards bodies and consortia, including ITU-T and ITU-R, SMPTE, and INCITS. David holds a BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge, England.

Newly elected to a 2-year term:

Dr. Mark Davis, Google, Inc.
Dr. Mark Davis co-founded the Unicode project and has been the president of the Unicode Consortium since its incorporation in 1991. Having held positions at IBM and Apple, Mark joined Google in 2006 where he has been working on software internationalization focusing on effective and secure use of Unicode (especially in the index and search pipeline), the software internationalization libraries (including ICU), and stable international identifiers.

“We also wish to thank retiring directors Marypat Meuli and James Robertson for their combined many years of service to the Consortium as board members.” said Davis.

---

Over 140,000 characters are available for adoption to help the Unicode Consortium’s work on digitally disadvantaged languages

IUC 38 Keynote Presenter Announced

KEYNOTE PRESENTER ANNOUNCED!

Dr. Mark Davis  Unicode President and Co-Founder

The Unicode Consortium has announced that its president and co-founder, Dr. Mark Davis, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC), November 3-5. Dr. Davis’s talk, Emoji: Past, Present, and Future, will discuss where emoji came from, why they have gotten so popular, where they’ve gone wrong, and what the future will bring.

“Emoji became very popular in Japan right after they were introduced in 1999,” said Dr. Davis. “Once they were added to Unicode in 2010, they became popular worldwide, used in modern mobile phones, texting systems, email, and so on. For example, there were some 6,000 articles on emoji in the month after Unicode 7.0 released, according to Google News.”

Dr. Davis will explore the history of emoji, how they came to be added to Unicode, how they are used in practice, and some of the deficiencies that people see. For example, what about the lack of human diversity and why isn’t there a hot dog emoji? He will then illuminate some of the future additions from Unicode and answer some of the most common questions about emoji.

IUC is the premier event covering the latest in industry standards and best practices for bringing software and Web applications to worldwide markets. Subject areas include the global impact, programming practices, fonts and rendering, and mobile computing. For the eighth year, Adobe will be sponsoring the conference.

To view the full IUC agenda and to register, visit www.unicodeconference.org.