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

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Unicode Board Members and Officers

The Unicode Consortium would like to welcome two new board members, Bob Jung and Greg Welch, and a new vice president, Peter Constable.

Bob Jung is the Director of Engineering for Internationalization at Google, Inc. He built and leads the globally distributed team that develops highly scalable technologies and infrastructure used throughout Google to deliver internationalized and localized products. Previously, at Netscape, he built the team that established much of the early work on internationalization for the web and browsers. Even earlier, he helped drive the initial Unix/POSIX internationalization specifications and standards via work with industry consortiums (/usr/grp, Uniforum, Unix International). Prior to Google, Bob worked for Netscape/AOL, Apple, MIPS, Nippon Unisoft and UniSoft.

Greg Welch of Intel Corporation is Director of Strategic Marketing in Intel’s PC Client Group. Among his recent accomplishments has been responsibility for driving the formulation and coordination of Intel’s Ultrabook™ program. Previous positions at Intel include:

• Director, Intel’s Architecture Group, Global WIMAX Organization: responsible for business development relationships between Intel, Clearwire, Best Buy and OEMs to promote the world’s first national 4G network.
• Director of Strategy and Industry Initiatives in Intel’s Software and Solutions Group: drove Intel’s efforts to enable software for multi-core architectures.
• Director of Strategic Planning for Intel's Mobile Platforms Group: oversaw long-range roadmap planning and business strategy for all notebook platform, processor, and chipset products that became the Core® family of processors.
• Director of Brand Strategy: spearheaded the segmentation of Intel’s processor brands including the Itanium® and Xeon® brands for high-end server products, and the Celeron® brand for value PCs.

Peter Constable is Senior Program Manger at Microsoft. He was exposed to challenges of supporting non-Latin scripts in software systems and digital fonts while living in Thailand for five years. He began working on software internationalization in 1996 and became active in work on Unicode and other i18n standards activities shortly thereafter. Since 2003, he has worked for Microsoft on Unicode and support and international text display. He has long been active in the UTC, became a Unicode technical director in 2008, and has been the Unicode liaison to SC2 since 2007.

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The Unicode Consortium would like to thank Vint Cerf and Harald Alvestrand, who recently stepped down after many years of contributions as members of the board of directors.

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. He is responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company. Widely known as a "Father of the Internet," Vint is the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 1997, President Clinton recognized their work with the U.S. National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment." He served on the board of the Unicode Consortium from 2010 until now.

Harald Alvestrand has worked for Norsk Data, UNINETT (the University Network of Norway), EDB Maxware, Cisco Systems and, since 2006, for Google, Inc. Harald has been active in Internet standardization since 1991, and has written a number of RFCs. He was an area director of Applications and of Operations & Management in the IETF and a member of the IAB before serving as chair of the IETF from 2001 to 2006. He served on the board of the Unicode Consortium from 2001 until now.

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The Consortium also would like to thank Vice President Eric Muller, and Technical Directors John Jenkins and Mike Ksar, who recently stepped down from their roles as officers of the Consortium after serving for many years. They will continue to work with the Consortium on ongoing technical work.

Eric Muller is the former chair of INCITS/L2, the U.S. committee which coordinates its work closely with the ongoing work of the Unicode Technical Committee. Eric continues his contributions to the technical work of the Consortium through his work with the Unicode Technical Committee. John Jenkins has worked with the Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG) for many years, and continues to provide crucial maintenance and updates for the Unicode Database. Mike Ksar has convened ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 for many years, and continues in that capacity.

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For the listing of current directors and officers of the Consortium please see Unicode Directors, Officers and Staff. See also Former Board Members and Former Officers.