Dear Colleagues, I will be chairing the LGR work, and for those of you I don't already know a very brief introduction -- I first began to think about support for languages in 1986 – I was writing what became the Single UnixSpecification for a set of European OEMs and had to consider whether or not to add APIs to Unix for 8-bit single-byte coded characters (8859-*) to the existing 7-bit APIs for single-byte coded characters (ASCII).I revisited the problem again six years later, after the locale model had been added for single and multi-byte encodings, e.g., EUC and SJIS, and again, as an architect at Sun, when I elected to create the default UTF8 locale for Solaris. Over the next several years I consulted to HP’s Cupertino Systems Labs and IBM’s Palo Alto Research Center, making contributions to the i18n/l10n architectures and implementations of HP-UX and AIX. I became involved with the Unicode Consortium when it began to consider adopting proposed draft standards for encoding two writing systems I had some prior familiarity with – the Cherokee and a Unified Northern syllabaries.It was through participation in the UTC that I became aware of the issues presented by scripts with combining and/or context dependent characters, directionality, scripts not yet supported by Unicode, etc. Not all my work was pure Operating Systems and their internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), I worked at SRI during the transitions from hosttables to the DNS and participated in the efforts that lead to the NTIA's selection of ICANN as a contractor. I contributed to the IETF working groups on domain registration and internationalized domain names, and have worked for registries and registrars over the past decade and a half, and have participated in ICANN through the GNSO and through At-Large. My SOI is here: https://community.icann.org/display/gnsosoi/Eric+Brunner-Williams+SOI Enough about me, please, and on to the work. I encourage those of you who are not attending ICANN-52 to follow the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop session, as the experiences of the Arabic Script group will inform those of us working on the Latin Script, and the presentations by Wil Tan and Michel Suignard will be of general interest. Those who are attending ICANN-52 I strongly urge they attend the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop, and get to know each other during this opportunity for face-to-face interaction. Please note that the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, February 11th, at 13:00 UTC+8. For those east of the Atlantic Ocean -- Europe, Africa, Asia -- the meeting will in fact take place on Wednesday, February 11th, at 13:00 UTC+8 For those west of the Atlantic Ocean -- the Americas -- the meeting will in fact take place the previous day, e.g., at 9pm in Los Angeles (UTC-8). I thank you all for volunteering for this important, and quite vast undertaking, as Latin script forms the basis for languages from Abenaki (spoken in Northern New England & Quebec and the Maritimes) to Vietnamese, in each inhabited continent of the globe. Staff has been kind enough to forward to me each of your SOIs and/or CVs, and I will be writing each of you in the next few days. Eric Brunner-Williams Eugene, Oregon _______________________________________________ lgr mailing list lgr@icann.org https://mm.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/lgr