From: ver...@gmail.com [mailto:ver...@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Philippe Verdy
>>> 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... I'm not sure why people are ranting. I didn't say that membership was a requirement. Proposals are often submitted by individuals or entities that are not members. I just said that it's easier to drive things if you are a member. > 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? For someone with a reasonably-well prepared proposal, it generally doesn't take all that long to get processed. A proposal could be taken up at a UTC meeting and a decision taken right away, if the proposal is in good shape, in which case all that may be needed from the proposer at that point is to make minor changes and submit the document to WG2. It can certainly take longer in more complex proposals; but it's not very often that someone needs to keep driving a reasonable proposal for longer than a year. > 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, Um... SEI is not an organization you can join. It is a funded project being run by UC Berkeley. > 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. I'm not sure what you're on about. There are a number of non-profit organizations that have paid memberships in the Consortium, others that have Liaison relationships (at no cost), and still others that have on occasion brought proposals to UTC without any membership. > 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 ... Nice idea, but where are you proposing that money for this will come from? Count the number of members, calculate their membership dues, think about costs of running operations, and you'll quickly realize that Philippe Verdy will have to donate several million euros (OK, over a span of years) for this to have even slight feasibility. > 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, Philippe, you are simply mistaken. The important ballots happen in ISO JTC1/SC2, and documents are always available in the WG2 document register well before those ballots happen. > 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? You're making some wild conjectures here. A commercial company can certainly be working to meet the needs of "normal" individual users. (E.g., I certainly didn't leave SIL to work for Microsoft so that I could ignore the needs of minority language communities around the world.) Similarly, your criticism of religious organizations assumes that they cannot possibly be interested in the normal needs of "normal" people; this seems to me to be ideological bias on your part that makes sweeping assessments without evaluating any factual data. Peter
