Georeactor Blog

This week Unicode released the 15.1 beta, ahead of their next release in September.

A Unicode release includes new characters, new CLDR, and updated emoji data including emoji-sequences.txt - this lists all flags if they are included in the Recommended for General Interchange (RGI) set. Even though this file has a May 5th timestamp, Sark was not included.

There's still some hope for Sark to make it into this release cycle, because we're not adding characters to Unicode, just validating C+Q as a valid flag code. The most likely issue is that no one's bothered to catalogue every downstream change from a new region. Also a bit of my fault for not setting specific goals.

With the beta open now, I left my first feedback since January, (hopefully reasonably) thanking them for adding CQ to the regions code, noted it was not in the emoji, and asked about whether this reflects an RGI decision or if its a future release thing.
Two other comments were made on 15.1 already: one about Chinese characters, and one about how emoji are organized into categories.

Recently I was thinking about my participation in Unicode, civic tech, maps, ICT4D. When I was younger I was interested in many topics and the world seemed receptive to that. That jumpiness doesn't seem so possible now. I consider if these were incubator programs where I was supposed to get absorbed into the community and fill positions in the ranks, and staying a traveler is viewed as perplexing or even insulting. Maybe to be a good Unicode citizen, I should be triaging issues and take sides on Arabic presentation forms that I can't read. Or maybe if I was paying attention I could follow work on Universal Dependencies and on layout characters for Southeast Asian scripts.

With WikiMedia and an open source NLP org, I was more or less told that paid jobs were to reward volunteers who took on specific roles in the community. That's something I've failed to absorb and respond to effectively... or maybe I got old and introspective and apathetic.