The FarsiWeb Project is a research and development project at Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc. (formerly at Sharif University of Technology, Computing Center). The project started in January 1999, but the team members had been in the field since long before that. The FarsiWeb Project is currently sponsored by Sharif FarsiWeb, Inc, but it has had two main sponsors historically, Science and Arts Foundation (SAF) and High Council of Informatics of Iran (HCI). SAF had been the main financial sponsor, providing us with computers, books, and wages, always answering our rising requests, for both guidance or new accessories. HCI had been the main force behind the official acceptance of our work, both in Iran and internationally, trying very hard to help us pass the bureaucratic barriers. There has also been other sponsors, including but not limited to UNDP and Sharif University of Technology.
One of the project’s main goals is pushing the Iranian and Persian computing community to use “The Unicode Standard”, the universal character set. Unicode is synchronized the international standard “ISO/IEC 10646, Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS)”.
The FarsiWeb Project officially represents HCI in the Unicode Consortium, and has representatives in World Wide Web Consortium and ISO. It is also active in IETF and several free software and open source communities, including Gnome, GNU, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org.