Ideographic Research Group

The Ideographic Research Group (IRG), formerly called the Ideographic Rapporteur Group, is a subgroup of Working Group 2 (WG2) of ISO/IEC JTC1 SC2 (SC2), the subcommittee of the Joint Technical Committee of ISO and IEC which is responsible for developing standards within the field of coded character sets. IRG is composed of experts from China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries and regions that use Han characters, as well as experts representing the Unicode Consortium. The group is responsible for coordinating the addition of new CJK unified ideographs to the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646) and the Unicode Standard. The group meets twice a year for 4-5 days each time, and reports its activity to the subsequent meeting of WG2.
History.
The precursor to the Ideographic Rapporteur Group was the CJK Joint Research Group (CJK-JRG), which was established in 1990. In October 1993 this group was established as a subgroup of WG2 under SC2 with the name Ideographic Rapporteur Group (IRG). In June 2019 SC2 changed the name of the subgroup to Ideographic Research Group (IRG).
The IRG rapporteur from 1993 to 2004 was Zhang Zhoucai (张轴材), who had been convenor and chief editor of CJK-JRG from 1990 to 1993. Since 2004 the rapporteur has been Professor Lu Qin (陸勤) of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. In June 2018 the title of "Rapporteur" was changed to "Convenor".
Overview.
IRG is responsible for reviewing proposals for adding new CJK unified ideographs to the Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (ISO/IEC 10646) and the Unicode Standard, and submitting consolidated proposals for sets of CJK unified ideographs to WG2, which are then processed for encoding in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode standards by SC2 and the Unicode Technical Committee respectively. National and liaison bodies of SC2 that participate in IRG include China, Hong Kong, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Macau, Singapore, Taipei Computer Association, Unicode Consortium, United Kingdom, and Vietnam.
As of Unicode version 13.0, the IRG has been responsible for submitting several blocks of CJK unified ideographs and compatibility ideographs for encoding: