Interview with Toral Cowieson: On Stewardship, Sustainability, and Scalability at Unicode
Behind what most take for granted on screens today is the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit standards body responsible for the internationalization of software. Unicode’s role as a global utility is shaped not only by technical decisions but also by the narratives its leaders use to describe its purpose and direction. In this interview, SEI spoke with CEO Toral Cowieson about how she frames Unicode’s work, partnerships, and public responsibilities.
Toral Cowieson took the helm of Unicode Consortium as CEO in 2023, in a world still recovering from widespread upheaval. Through her leadership, Cowieson aims to streamline effective communication between different facets of the Consortium and beyond. Her comments below provide insight into how she sees the organization thinking about its current objectives and how her past career informs her present mission at Unicode: to establish a sustainable and scalable foundation of resources for its future.
- What does a “day in the life” look like as the Unicode CEO?
No day is the same. No four hours are even spent on the same thing. I have the opportunity to work on some of the most strategic things you could imagine and some of the most tactical. This role requires someone to wear multiple hats. You have to be comfortable navigating everything — from dealing with a UN agency, attracting new members and having conversations about why Unicode is relevant to their work, all the way to branding, including logo placement on something.
Every day is like that, and part of what I love about working with Unicode is that it is like that. In a way, we are a 35-plus-year-old startup, because if you join Unicode as a team member, you’re going to wear multiple hats. I think part of it comes from how Unicode evolved: operating leanly and smartly with the resources you have. Even though Unicode is perhaps the most widely-deployed technology in the world — 20 billion devices and counting — we operate with fewer than 3.5 full-time employees. We have thousands of people who have contributed to Unicode’s work on the technical side, and some who contribute on the operational side. But in terms of the staff that supports all of that? We’re very small.
As CEO, I have to operate on multiple tracks every single day. If you imagine having plates spinning: there might be one plate around board governance, one around financials, one around “what support do we need to provide for the technical groups,” event planning, partnerships, considering digitally disadvantaged languages, or answering questions like “what is Unicode doing around AI?”, etc. It can be the whole gamut.
There are some things that are on a regular cadence, like annual reporting, or compliance, or World Emoji Day, for example. That’s always on July 17th. And for any project, I like to begin with the end in mind: What do the measurable metrics of success look like?
I think about operating with strategic clarity and tactical flexibility. Particularly when we’re bringing other people into projects, I want them to feel successful. In turn, it’s important to define: What are the desired outcomes? And then, what are the things we need to do to get there?
- Can you sketch out what kind of resources are required to run Unicode?
I often think of the Finnish term sisu. It translates to operating with grit and resiliency with limited resources. What I love about Unicode is that we can experiment and pivot quickly. We don’t have to go through a whole lot of layers.
However, when you move quickly, you also have a responsibility not to cause a lot of churn. You don’t want to pivot for the sake of pivoting. That’s why it is really important to have metrics in place. So, how do you do things that are the right size for the organization but can still have big wins? In a way, that’s how the technical side has been operating for 35 years.
In my eyes, it seems wisest to not think in terms of a one-off solution, but scalable solutions that will be sustainable and take the organization into the next set of technologies or leaders. For example, we went with an organization called Little Green Light as a customer-relationship management system (CRM), because we used to manage everything through spreadsheets. And it works for us. It started out with the ability to have 500 records or 50,000. And now, as we’re doing more prospect development, it’s more than just managing member records — it’s also managing some of our finances. It’s our single source of truth beyond however long I’m with Unicode. As a steward, how do I make the choices that will grow with the organization?
- Could you tell us a little bit about your background and how those experiences have informed how you oversee Unicode today?
There are a few things that stand out. Instead of climbing a “career ladder,” I had the privilege of exploring a “career jungle gym.” So sometimes you move laterally, sometimes you move up. I finished my MBA in International Business, and I thought I was going to go work for IBM in a cubicle somewhere.
Instead, I was working for a tech company at the time, and the gentleman who was the CEO said, “Oh, you should go talk to my wife — she’s developing a series for PBS, working with Native communities around the U.S.” So I actually started my career in documentary film production. Then, I worked for a boutique ad agency when Netscape first came around, developing websites. I was hired as a Director of Internet Development; nobody knew what that meant, but we figured it out.
Then I went to work for a company called NewsEdge, which was later acquired by Thomson Reuters. I was hired to run a product team, and as part of that, my team built out a taxonomy — at a time when news was becoming commoditized — across nineteen industry verticals so people could get the top ten stories on their desktop based on their industry, job function, and region — essentially the ones most relevant to their jobs.
After that, I ran my own consulting practice, and then I started working for an international NGO, the Internet Society. I was hired to develop their Next Generation Leaders program, identifying next-generation young people in policy, technology, and business who could advance the internet in their world — whether that was in India, or Turkey, or Bulgaria. We had experiential programs through fellowship programs, but we also ran online training for tens of thousands of young people a year on these different aspects.
When I was looking for my next opportunity after the Internet Society, I saw a job posting on LinkedIn to come in and work for Unicode. What I loved about the opportunity was that it brought in so many aspects of my career. The documentary filmmaking is where I learned how to lead with influence when you don’t have authority or a lot of money. How do you inspire people to buy into your vision and commit to what you do because of who you are and their belief in the organization and the mission?
My work with the ad agency was valuable because we worked with clients in a lot of different industries. How do you talk to people who come from different areas and have different lexicons? For example, if you’re talking about “cellular” with someone working in telecommunications, that’s very different from talking about “cellular” with a biologist. How do you communicate in a way that forms a connection?
Working for the international NGO was about applying fundamental business principles for a greater good. Even if you’re working with a nonprofit, you need to be outcome-driven, which helps frame metrics of progress.
These are just a few of the different aspects and lessons throughout my career that inform what I want to bring to Unicode for its next stage. Part of what was attractive about Unicode is knowing that though there are things I can bring, there are still so many things to learn and challenge myself with.
Ultimately, part of my mission in life is to help others manifest their best selves. How can I create the space or environment, wherever I am, to help others manifest their best?
- Are there any projects in Unicode right now that you are particularly enthusiastic about?
I’m really excited about our new website. The website is not just exciting because it’s a website, but because it’s about amplifying the work of Unicode and bringing others in — creating the space for people to contribute ideas that make us better. We especially want to focus on working with young people to become the next generation for whatever Unicode needs to do. That’s really important.
I think of Unicode as producing two things: there’s what we produce, in terms of the Unicode portfolio or suite, and then there’s how we do it. For any project we do, one of the things that guides and inspires me is the space that Mark [Davis, co-founder and former Unicode President] has created for this work, which is from a point of humility and integrity. That deeply resonates with who I am, and I have to hold myself accountable to setting that bar for anybody else who works with us.
- As you sit on a variety of different technical committees across the Unicode ecosystem, how do you navigate consolidating different impulses to make Unicode intelligible to certain stakeholders? Do you find often having to do internal translation?
There’s a phrase I heard a couple of years ago: “cylinders of excellence.” It’s basically silos, and I think that’s a lot of what happens within Unicode. When you’re working with engineers and technologists in particular, they can get… you know, into “how many angels on a pinhead?” kind of conversations. Perhaps that works within the Unicode ecosystem when they’re talking to one another.
I try to find connections around scale, effectiveness, best practices, tooling, and processes, and look for the commonalities or pain points that I see. How can one group learn from another? A lot of Unicode’s processes have grown organically: volunteers have figured out one-off solutions that work for their piece, but don’t necessarily get applied elsewhere. So, one of the positions we have is a tech services leader who asks how to support our technical groups and grow the ecosystem with resilience and stability.
If you think about all the organizations Unicode touches, there’s such a lack of awareness. Unicode’s work is so visible, but how we do it is so invisible.
When you talk about the Unicode ecosystem, it is important to prioritize thinking about the broader ecosystem. If you think about all the organizations Unicode touches, there’s such a lack of awareness. Unicode’s work is so visible, but how we do it is so invisible.
And that’s why forming partnerships matters. We’ve had a longstanding one with SEI — that’s obvious. But we’ve also formed partnerships with other organizations, like MultiLingual magazine. We were just identified as a partner for UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages. I’ve also been asked to join ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, on their Technology Consortium Council.
So when you talk about communicating, it’s about how we can take what the engineers go so deeply into and raise it to a level that represents the Unicode portfolio to all these other audiences in a way they can understand, while still respecting the technicalities. We need to start talking about these things as products: not just as “CLDR project” and “ICU project” and “ICU4X” and “the Standard”, but as products that we can up-level for all these other audiences we need to reach so that they’re aware of us and can be ambassadors for our work.
- As the CEO of Unicode, is there anything you hope for in Unicode’s ongoing partnership with SEI?
I was just looking at a picture of Debbie Anderson and Rick McGowan from many years ago. I’m so grateful for everything Debbie has done, building that foundation of 120 scripts and so much more. I also really love how you all are running with that to create SEI 2.0.
I only see the relationship between Unicode and SEI getting stronger. When I talk about the work Unicode does as connecting with identity, culture, dignity, voice, and marginalized communities, it can sometimes be a little bit uncomfortable for the pure technologists. But I think SEI starts with the heart first.
For example, I love the Person Name Formatting project. I really identify with this initiative, because when I had to apply for my high school diploma or my college diploma, there wasn’t enough space for my full name. I had to reduce my middle name to five letters from twenty-three letters because of technological limits. Technological advancement should never come at the expense of individual and communal identity in using these tools. Sometimes, this core commitment can be mired in the technicalities of code and policy, but we have to remember it as an essential root of what we do at Unicode. SEI starts with purity of the documents from script communities themselves, and there’s something deeply humanizing about it. Unicode has a lot to learn from SEI in that regard.
- How do your ideas about identity and culture inform what you envision for Unicode’s trajectory?
We have these weekly calls on Mondays at 9 a.m. Pacific. All of our technical leaders are invited, plus any other team members. There was a suggestion at one point that we move those calls to every other week, or once a month, or whatever it was.
And… I resisted. I said, you know, let’s keep the call, and if we ever don’t need it, we can cut it short at 30 minutes, or we cancel it. This is how I meet the people on the team, because we’re all distributed. If we didn’t meet this way, I wouldn’t know that somebody had a bicycling accident and they’re recovering, or I wouldn’t know the name of Markus’s cat, Boo, who sometimes joins the call on his lap. When Boo is in the meeting, Boo gets added to the agenda as an attendee.
I don’t know if I’m answering your question directly, but we have our own humanity. I think part of the work is going to be maintaining that humanity, even as technology is coming fast and furious at us.
When I think about AI or other things, I think operating with that humanity, and setting a culture and a bar that this is how Unicode operates — with humanity — is going to be part of navigating the future. I don’t know that it would change anything in a dramatic sense, but I think it’s fundamental human decency and integrity and kindness, especially when we’re navigating an uncertain world. I’d probably start with that more than anything else. All of this gets done because of humans.
- You were recently honored as part of Forbes 50 Over 50. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that experience?
I would love to tell you about that experience. I wish I knew more about that experience. I don’t know who nominated me. And really, they nominated Unicode, because that’s who I have the privilege of representing. While I wear the title of CEO, my more important title — my self-title — is steward. I’m a steward of the millions of hours of work that have gone into what we all take for granted. Stewardship for scalability and sustainability, right?
For Forbes 50 Over 50, I got an email in early July. Erik, who works with us, had to confirm it wasn’t spam. He found out it was legit, they had a few questions, and then at the end of July, I had the privilege of being recognized as one of the 50 Over 50 in their Innovator grouping.
It’s a privilege, and it’s a responsibility. We had a Forbes 50 Over 50 luncheon in New York in early November. I will say that I was overwhelmed going into the luncheon. It took me a little while to calm down, but I didn’t feel like an impostor because I was repping Unicode.
At lunch, I sat next to the CEO of Meals on Wheels. The woman to my right was the CEO of Save Our Children, working to reduce child mortality rates for children under five around the world. I met the CEO of the Innocence Project, the woman who’s helping people get off death row. A neurosurgeon who developed a fluorescent dye to help detect nerves during surgery. I could go on.
In Forbes 50 Over 50, there are four groups: Innovators, Finance, Impact, and Lifestyle. There were about 200-250 people at this luncheon. The power of the different ecosystems they represent and the power of our collective work was truly inspiring and amazing. It’s so rewarding to have these new connections and to have this platform to increase awareness of Unicode. In a way, we also support all of their work as Unicode is fundamental to what everyone in that room can do online to deliver on their ROI and their impact.
- What do you want the public to know about Unicode? Are there any opportunities that Unicode is working on to connect with the public more?
We want you to get involved. Don’t take this for granted — we are all stewards of this global public utility.
We are creating new avenues for the people to get involved. We’ve run an internship program for the past three summers. We started with one individual three summers ago, and then expanded to include the Google Summer of Code, the Stanford SILICON Initiative — we repeated those these past two years. We grew from one intern three years ago to I think a dozen this year.
We are also forming a partnership with a marketing professor at a university, and his students will likely be developing a campaign for our Adopt-a-Character program. I think it’ll be fun for young people. And it’s B2C — business-to-consumer — which will be interesting. I think if they get creative, and we can build momentum with what they’re doing, then we get more funds to support digitally-disadvantaged languages. That would be amazing. Most importantly, if you believe in the importance of Unicode’s work and mission, we invite you to learn more and get involved. In the meantime, thank you to member organizations and donors for your support!