Open Source Networking Days: Think Globally, Collaborate Locally

Networking industry experts gather at the Orange Gardens facility outside of Paris, France on October 9, 2017, for the Open Source Networking Day event, hosted by Atos and Orange.

Something that we’ve learned at The Linux Foundation over the years is that there is just no substitute for periodic, in-person, face-to-face collaboration around the open source technologies that are rapidly changing our world. It’s no different for the open networking projects I work with as end users and their ecosystem partners grapple with the challenges and opportunities of unifying various open source components and finding solutions to accelerate network transformation. This fall, we decided to take The Linux Foundation networking projects (OpenDaylight, ONAP, OPNFV, and others) on the road to Europe and Japan by working with local site hosts and network operators to host Open Source Networking Days in Paris, Milan, Stockholm, London, Tel Aviv, and Yokohama.

This series of one-day events was a valuable opportunity for local ecosystems to meet and collaborate around the latest in open source networking. Heather Kirksey and Phil Robb of The Linux Foundation attended and spoke at the events to share our vision of the open networking stack, build relationships, and facilitate community collaboration. Our local site hosts were amazing—taking the lead on organizing, programming, and executing events in line with the needs and interests of their various regions. On behalf of The Linux Foundation, “thank you” to all our incredible site hosts, speakers, attendees, and sponsors: Amdocs, ATOS, Cloudify, Enter Cloud Suite, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Login, NEC, Nokia, Orange, Red Hat, SUSE, and Vodafone.

The feedback we’ve received on these events has been very positive. Attendees appreciated the opportunity to learn about the various components of the open networking stack, examine the integration and collaboration points between them, and map that to their strategies for rolling out cloud, SDN, NFV, MANO, and more across networks. By taking the OSN Days on the road, we were able to meet in-person with more than 460 people—from developers to service providers to vendors—venues near them with an agenda focused on their needs. Attendees also expressed their desire for more hands-on work (e.g. tutorials, demos, workshops, hackathons, etc.) and we are taking that into consideration for future OSN Days.

I encourage you to check out the great content from the latest tour. From the OSN Days Tour website, you can navigate to each tour page, and access all the slide presentations under the “View Session Slides” tab. You can also watch videos here from the OSN Day London Event, and read detailed recap blogs of both the London and Stockholm events, posted by site hosts directly.

The next tour is being planned for India in late January 2018, and other tours are being considered for North America and Asia—stay tuned. In the meantime, please consider joining an Open Source Networking User Group in your region.

We hope to see you next year at Open Networking Summit, an OSN Day, or an OSN user group meetup near you! Please email osndays@linuxfoundation.org with any questions.