Thoughts on working with the Emoji Subcommittee (was Re: Thoughts on Emoji Selection Process)

[William_J_G Overington via Unicode]

May I mention please a situation that may be of interest as indicative of some of the issues with the present system.

In the discussion after the end of the lecture “Unicode Emoji: How do we standardize that je ne sais quoi?” at the Internationalization & Unicode Conference 39 conference in October 2015, a gentleman in the audience raised the possibility of emoji for ‘I’ and for ‘You’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ldSVbXbjl4

I was not there but I have viewed the video several times.

I decided that trying to design emoji for 'I' and for 'You' seemed interesting so I decided to have a go at designing some.

However pictures of people with arrows seemed to be ambiguous in meaning and also they seemed to need to be too detailed for rendering in mobile telephone messages and in many situations in web pages and emails generally.
 
So eventually I decided that abstract designs would be a good solution to the problem.

I designed abstract emoji in two colours, yet such that a monochrome fallback display would still be recognisable.

There is a web page in my webspace that has more information about this, including the designs, including links back to several posts in the archives of this mailing list, some by me, some by other people.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/abstract_emoji.htm

At one stage I sent a copy of the PDF (Portable Document Format) document to 'docsubmit' an was informed that it was not in the correct format for a submission. A problem that I find with 'docsubmit' is that there is no indication of who is running it, replies are just from 'docsubmit' with no name of a human being. I had sent the document with the idea that if it were included in the Document Register that discussion could take place that could lead to progress.

So I considered trying to prepare a document compliant with the submission rules, for emoji for 'I' and for 'You' as mentioned in the discussion period in the conference session, together with perhaps a few other personal pronouns as well.

I have not produced such a document yet for a number of reasons.

It takes time to produce such a document. I am happy to spend that time producing a document but I am somewhat deterred by the possibility that the document might just be discarded and never get anywhere with no explanation.

It is not clear whether abstract emoji would be accepted. If I remember correctly at one stage ESC (Emoji Subcommittee) opined that abstract emoji were possible, though possibly the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) was of the opposite opinion and it there seems no clarity on the matter at present.

All proposals for new emoji seem to now require those blue and red charts from Google Trends.

I have never understood why these are needed and what they are supposed to prove. That being for any emoji proposal.

When it comes to a proposal for emoji for 'I' and for 'You', I cannot decide what Google Trends chart would be of any relevance to support an emoji proposal.

I opine that emoji for 'I' and for 'You' are a good idea. I am happy to try to submit a proposal if there is a reasonable prospect of success, but the requirement for Google Trends pictures seems to be a block to me being able to do that at present as I just do not understand it all.

If anyone out there would like to help get emoji for 'I' and for 'You' and maybe a few other personal pronouns encoded, whether using my designs or other designs, whether abstract designs or not abstract designs, whether with me being involved or otherwise, then that would be welcome.

William Overington

Thursday 16 August 2018