Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK

Organizer: University of Glenmorgan

Facility: Wales Millennium Centre

Cost: £450 for other participants, £395 for Authors

Converged networks and services are becoming a fast reality to provide anytime, anywhere networked services. While the standards bodies and the processes are providing the necessary normalisation by way of standards, the implementation of standards compliant networked systems to provide for converged services require development and test deployments before they go into production networks. Open Source software packages in these areas will make a difference by their availability and therefore providing a means of test deploying the new services. However, the challenge is to identify what is available as well as what is expected to be available from the open source community in terms of such software packages.

The proliferation of mobile communication provides scope for many innovative mobile applications. Emerging open mobile devices that come with open development kits would make available the development environment to a large developer community. Such resources, projects and/or communities need to be identified and/or facilitated.

From a business perspective, there is a big opportunity to realise cost effective services by providing cost effective solutions. This is true of markets in South and South-East Asia. The open source solutions would make a difference here. Consequently, interoperability with other commercial solutions is a concern. Finally, there are many technical concerns in the open source developer community that are not addressed. The NGN-OPS workshop intends to address the above mentioned issues.

The event is aimed at open source developers, contributors to the standard organizations, engineers, research students and any open source enthusiast.