Event Dates: October 22-23, 2024

Where: San Francisco Bay Area (Hosted at Google’s Sunnyvale, California campus). For planning purposes, the closest airports are San Francisco International Airport (SFO) and San Jose Mineta International Airport (SJC) and the recommended public transportation option is via VTA Light Rail to the Lockheed Martin Station.

The Second Annual Unicode Technology Workshop (UTW 2) builds upon the success of last year’s event, which brought together more than 80 internationalization enthusiasts for two days of connecting, learning, and envisioning the possibilities. 

UTW 2 is designed to be accessible to GILT professionals and students, while providing enough information and depth to be relevant to established internationalization experts. The primary goals of the workshop are to strengthen the internationalization community and further the adoption of Unicode standards and technology. For this year’s workshop, Unicode will also be adding case studies and speed networking to provide an even more engaging experience for all attendees. 

Call for Submissions Now Open!

Unicode is pleased to announce that session proposals for UTW 2 are now being accepted!

We are seeking proposals for workshops, seminars, free-form discussions, and lightning talks that center around Unicode i18n libraries, locale data frameworks, globalization tooling, localization pipelines, input methods, and text rendering. Come connect with other Unicode users, share your knowledge and experience, and help us envision the future of Unicode technology. You will come away with deeper knowledge on how to solve tough problems in the i18n and l10n space and how to engineer products that work better for global users. Note: To encourage maximum collaboration amongst the attendees, this is an in-person-only event.

If you have an idea for a session that you would like to lead, you can register your interest in contributing by using the following link: Submissions. We are interested in proposals that represent a variety of perspectives, so i18n and l10n technical specialists, working GILT professionals, and university students are all encouraged to propose ideas. Deadline for submissions is August 12, 2024 by 5:00PM PT. Proposals will be reviewed in late August and session hosts will be notified mid-September.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Sponsorship opportunities are available at various levels. Sponsorship benefits include complimentary registrations, opportunities to lead a session or workshop, recognition on the event website, program and event materials, visibility on social media, and much more. Specific offerings vary by sponsorship level.

If you want to demonstrate your industry leadership, enhance your brand, share your knowledge, promote your products and services, and foster community building, contact events@unicode.org today to learn more. Sponsorship discounts are available to Unicode Full and Supporting Members.

About the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is the premier non-profit open source, open standards body for the internationalization of all software and services. 

For more than 30 years, the Unicode Consortium has coordinated the efforts of a world-wide team of volunteer programmers and linguists to standardize, evolve, and maintain a global software foundation that allows virtually every computer system and service to help people connect using their native language.

For additional information, visit home.unicode.org.

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By Elango Cheran, Vice Chair of the Community Engagement Team

If you have been receiving the Unicode Newsletter or following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and the Friends of Unicode on Facebook, you have likely seen information about new Unicode events and resources.

These events and tools are the result of the coordinated efforts of Unicode’s Community Engagement (CE) Team. This team was formed in March of 2022 after our logistics partner for the Internationalization and Unicode Conference and Unicode decided to go in different directions.  

A small group of volunteers and Unicode staff saw this as an opportunity to explore different types of events and see how we could reach a more global audience. Since July of last year, we have held seven online events. We conscientiously maintained a focus on the online medium for these initial events to ensure broader reach and access to knowledge, which is different from how Unicode has approached events in the past. From the recent online events, we have drawn in hundreds of new people from 65+ countries. And for each of those, we have made available and promoted the recordings on the Unicode YouTube channel.

And all that is to say, there is more to do!

As a small non-profit that depends on volunteers, we started modestly and have been pushing our boundaries, experimenting with our tools, and expanding our capabilities with each event.

The upcoming Unicode Technology Workshop is a natural extension of that experimentation. While this is in California as an in-person event, we hope that we can take lessons learned and apply this model to additional in-person events in other parts of the globe.

I am personally thankful for the opportunity to help Unicode connect with a more global audience, given how foundational and impactful Unicode’s work is on people, languages, and communities around the world. The work of our team is made possible by my committed colleagues, some of whom are from organizations such as Google, UC Berkeley, and Spotify.

It is encouraging to see the growing interest in events, as well as interest in people partnering with Unicode to launch such efforts. If you have ideas on types of outreach programming or educational tools that would help you or others on your internationalization journey, please reach out to us via events@unicode.org.

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By the Unicode Technology Workshop Steering Committee

The Unicode Technology Workshop (UTW) is the internationalization event you want to attend this year.

Hear from internationalization experts from Adobe, Google, Meta, Square, UC Berkeley, and many more. Sessions include workshops, seminars, free-form discussions, and lightning talks centered around i18n libraries, locale data updates, globalization tooling, localization pipelines, input methods, and text rendering. Day 2 includes unconference sessions driven by attendees.

Topics for the workshops and seminars include:

• Introduction to Unicode and Beyond
• Intro to ICU4X Workshop
• PersonNames in the Real World
• Unicode Guide to Internationalization
• Internationalizing the Internet’s Domain Name System
• The First Steps to Go Global
• Fixing Input Methods for Abugida Scripts
• Automatic Grammar Agreement in Message Formatting
• Prove it! Data Driven Conformance Testing
• Unicode Source Code Handling
• Script Encoding Initiative: Past and Future
• Character to Glyph: how Unicode® Text Makes it to Your Screen
• Critical Values for I18n Testing
• ADLaM, the Power of a Script: Evolution, Community Impact & Challenges Post-Unicode
• { }: MessageFormat v2
• What's New in CLDR and ICU
• Unicode Properties & Algorithms
• 🔥😮‍💨🍄🪦💀🐷🐙😤
• Lessons Launching Dozens of New Languages in a UI
• Locale Aware Units and Units Inflection
• “Ask Unicode Anything” with Mark Davis, Unicode’s Cofounder and CTO

Attendees will be encouraged at the event to bring up topics for unconference sessions and lightning talks.

Network with developers and users to help shape the future of Unicode technology. Expect two days of community building around the Unicode technology that makes software work for billions of people across all devices.

When and where: November 7-8, 2023. Bay Area (Hosted at Google). In-Person only!

Register Now at https://www.unicode.org/events/event-registration.html.

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