Mark Davis Steps Down as Board Chair
Mark Davis, co-founder of the Unicode Consortium and a pivotal figure in global digital communication, has transitioned from Chair of the Board of Directors to a continuing role on the Board. He will also remain Chair of the CLDR Technical Committee and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Consortium. This transition reflects Davis’s commitment to ensuring a smooth leadership transition and his continuing dedication to the Consortium’s mission of enabling everyone around the globe and across all technology platforms to seamlessly communicate and collaborate in their own languages.
During Davis’s tenure as Board Chair, the Unicode Consortium solidified its position as a crucial global organization. Under his leadership, the Consortium standardized character encoding for modern and historical scripts and symbols, including the now ubiquitous emoji. He also founded two vital projects that have become core pillars of the Consortium: CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), providing structured data for internationalization, and ICU (International Components for Unicode), delivering production-ready code libraries. These projects, along with the Unicode encoding, are fundamental to virtually all modern phones and operating systems, enabling billions of people worldwide to communicate in their native languages.
“One of the most satisfying accomplishments in a career is to find successors who take on challenging positions – and achieve even greater impact,” said Mark Davis. “Markus Scherer has done that for ICU; Jennifer Daniel for the Emoji working group (aka ESC), and Toral Cowieson as CEO of the Consortium. Having worked with Cathy during pivotal years in the development of the Unicode encoding, I'm confident that her talents and skills will make her an exceptional Chair of the Board.”
Cathy Wissink Elected as Board Chair
We are pleased to announce that the Unicode Board of Directors voted unanimously to appoint Cathy Wissink as the new chair. Wissink is a 30-year veteran of the technology industry, focused primarily at the intersection of international markets and innovation. The bulk of her career was spent at Microsoft, in diverse roles ranging from engineering to government affairs to product certification. She’s no stranger to the Unicode Consortium, having worked on Unicode and internationalization implementation from the earliest versions of 32-bit Windows through Windows 7. Wissink also led Microsoft’s participation in the Unicode Technical Committee from 2000-2005 and served as UTC vice-chair and INCITS/L2 chair from 2002-2005.
"I am grateful for the trust that Mark and the board have placed in me as the incoming chair of the Board of Directors for the Unicode Consortium," said Wissink. "Unicode's products and standards are essential to global digital communications, and as innovation progresses and languages evolve, there is still significant work to enable all languages in digital spaces. I look forward to collaborating with Mark Davis and Toral Cowieson, as well as the broader community of technologists, linguists, and specialists to advance Unicode's mission."
Welcome to new Board Members, John Tinsley and Manuela Giese
John Tinsley is the VP of AI Solutions at Unicode member company Translated. He’s a computer scientist with more than 15 years of experience in the localization industry. Prior to Translated, he founded Iconic Translation Machines, an award-winning language technology software business that pioneered the commercial deployment of Neural Machine Translation technology. John led the business for almost a decade before selling it to RWS in 2020 in one of the largest technology deals in the language industry.
He holds a PhD in Computer Science and a degree in Applied Computational Linguistics and is a regular public speaker on topics related to language, translation, and business.Manuela Giese is a Principal Group Manager at Microsoft. She has spent the last 25 years working on various aspects of localization across content types and languages including complex scripts; she still has fond memories of managing complex script languages through localization deliveries in the earlier days of Unicode support.
In recent years, she has been more focused on business horizontals supporting localization models and their challenges. She is passionate about language and culture and how both intersect with equality and gender. She has spent significant time in Europe, South America, and the US and currently resides on the ancestral homeland of the Nooksack, Lummi, and other Coast Salish peoples.
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