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What is the Unicode Consortium?

The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit organization responsible for developing, maintaining, and publishing the Unicode Standard — the universal character encoding used by virtually all modern software. Founded in 1991 in San Jose, California, the Consortium brings together major technology companies, academic institutions, and individual experts to ensure that every writing system in the world is representable in digital text.

Without the Unicode Consortium, every software vendor would maintain its own incompatible encoding, and moving text between systems would require constant conversion. The Consortium eliminated that chaos by creating and stewarding a single, open, royalty-free standard.

Membership and Governance

The Consortium operates on a tiered membership model. Full members (typically large technology corporations) have voting rights on the Unicode Standard itself. Associate members participate in working groups. Supporting members fund the work without voting rights.

Notable full members include: - Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, SAP - Emojipedia (now Zedge), Netflix, Meta - Government bodies and national standards organizations

The Board of Directors governs the Consortium. Technical decisions are made by the Unicode Technical Committee (UTC), which meets quarterly to review character encoding proposals, emoji submissions, and algorithm changes. Meetings are open for public observation via teleconference.

What the Consortium Produces

The Emoji Process

Emoji are now one of the most visible outputs of the Consortium. Submitting a new emoji requires a formal proposal following documented criteria: uniqueness, anticipated usage, visual distinctiveness, and compatibility. The UTC evaluates proposals at its quarterly meetings; accepted emoji typically appear in a Unicode release 18–24 months after initial acceptance.

Relationship to ISO

The Unicode Consortium co-maintains the character repertoire with ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2, which publishes ISO/IEC 10646. The two standards are synchronized at the code point level — every character in Unicode has the same code point in ISO 10646, and vice versa. The standards diverge only in their supplemental specifications (Unicode adds algorithms and properties that 10646 does not).

Contributing to Unicode

Anyone can contribute:

• Propose a character: Submit a formal proposal following the Unicode proposal template
• Report errors: File bugs in the Unicode issue tracker
• Participate in working groups: The Consortium has groups for emoji, CLDR, security, and more
• Attend UTC meetings: Public observers are welcome

Quick Facts