The Trailblazers that Made Bangla Computing Viable

[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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Admission is free for IMUG members and host company employees, and $5 for all others. No charge for livestream access. IMUG membership is only $20 for the first year, $15 for annual renewal, or $100 for lifetime membership. Click here to join, renew or pay a single non-member event fee via PayPal. Cash and checks also accepted at our events. http://imug.org/join

To attend in San Jose, please RSVP by noon on the Monday before this event to avoid waiting for your badge to be printed when you arrive.

To attend via the livestream, please RSVP and then message IMUG volunteer Axelle Melin. Meetup Plus members can contact her via the Chat button on her Meetup profile. Everyone else can message her via LinkedIn.

A recording of this event will be posted to the IMUG YouTube channel.

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Many thanks to Xiang Zhao and Adobe Globalization for hosting IMUG events!

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