Submissions open for 2020 Emoji

[Christoph Päper via Unicode]

Mark Davis:
> 
> In some cases we've have contacted people to see if they want to engage
> with other proposers. But to handle larger numbers we'd need a simple,
> light-weight way to let people know, while maintaining people's privacy
> when they want it.

Collaborative editing of (proposal) documents is actually a thing in 2018 and can even be done with (semi-)anonymous contributors.

> The ESC periodically prioritizes some of the larger sets and forwards a
> list to the UTC.

Like I said: no systematic reason. Some animals are put on hold, others are forwarded individually, for instance. The ESC should identify preexisting semantic sets of or criteria for pictograms, or accept collective proposals for such, instead of insisting on a single independent proposal form for each emoji. For instance, a simple sufficient (but not mandatory) criterion for the relevance of animal pictograms would be whether they appear on official road signs anywhere in the world, and a preexisting cultural set for animals would be the [Five Animals] representing styles of kung-fu (i.e. a Crane and possibly a Mantis would be missing). 

  [Five Animals]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Animals

>> If an emoji proposal is well-formed and fits the general scope it should
>> be forwarded to UTC.
> 
> Emoji are a relatively small part of the work of the consortium, and should
> remain that way. 

The number of emojis is small compared to some scripts, but large compared to others. The importance of (new) emojis is small by some accounts, but large by others (like the Adopt-a-Character programme). If you accepted the principle of preexisting sets and criteria and agreed on some, a lot of emoji proposals would be simpler to assess, hence reducing the work required for emoji.

> So the UTC depends on the ESC to evaluate the quality and
> priority of proposals, based on the factors described.

I don't really disagree about the control of formal quality the subcommittee provides, I disagree about it keeping the gate on priority. You would not delay the encoding of some characters of a script due to their perceived importance while advancing others; for example, a large chunk of the remaining rarely used CJVK logograms is added in each new version of TUS, but they are not filtered by importance.

>> I would like to help clean up the data, e.g. by commenting on the Google 
>> Spreadsheet that is embedded on the Unicode page. How can I do that as an 
>> individual member?
> 
> That would be helpful, thanks. What I would suggest is taking a copy of the
> sheet, dumping into a spreadsheet (Google or Excel) and adding a column for
> your suggestions.

Um, what about comments on the actual spreadsheet since Google Docs already provides that feature? I hate to reduplicate work for myself or anyone else.