IMUG

[In San Jose and online — See below to request livestream access]

When Unicode and OpenType were introduced, they promised a more standardized future for multi-script digital communication. Yet through much of the 2000s, Bangla software remained fragmented, with major technology companies slow to support it and South Asian governments hesitant to adopt emerging standards.

This talk will explore the pivotal role of Bengali open source software hobbyists—individuals who took it upon themselves to build fonts, keyboards, and localized applications when no one else would. Embodying a hacker ethos, these hobbyists sidestepped bureaucratic barriers and corporate delays, working with whatever resources they had to make Bangla computing viable. This talk aims to present a view into the closely intertwined histories of open source software and software localization.

Anushah Hossain is a historian of the internet and Research Director of the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) at the University of California, Berkeley. After years of studying the history of Indic script encodings and Unicode's inner workings, she decided to become directly involved in the process. In her role at SEI, she now oversees Unicode proposals on historic and modern minority scripts. She is also currently working on a pre-history of the Unicode Standard

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