Schlagwort-Archive: Science

EUCNC 2014 workshop: Mobile Cloud Infrastructures and Services (MCIS)

Workshop Motivation and Background

This workshop addresses the three main topics that are significant for the realization of the Future Internet Architecture, which are the Mobile Networking, Network Function Virtualization and Service Virtualization.

While mobile communication networks have been established decades ago and are still continuously evolving, cloud computing and cloud services became a hot topic in recent years and is expected to have significant impact on novel applications as well as on ICT infrastructures. Cloud computing and mobile communication networks have been considered separate from each other in the past. However, there are various possible synergies between them. This trend supports the use of cloud computing infrastructures as processing platforms for signal and protocol processing of mobile communication networks, in particular for current (4G) and future (5G) generation networks. This enables several opportunities to optimize performance of cloud applications and services observed by mobile users, whose devices are connected to the cloud via wireless access networks. This trend is also in line with the emerging ETSI activities in Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The “Mobile Cloud Infrastructures and Services” workshop focuses on the thematic area that the EU project MCN is concentrating on and is addressing emerging technologies in cloud services and mobile communication infrastructures. Emphasis will be put on possible integration scenarios and synergies between them.

Workshop Structure
Based on the successful format of the FUNEMS 2013, “Mobile Cloud Networking and Edge ICT “ workshop, we plan to have a good mix of invited keynote talks from key participants in the EU FP7 projects MCN, iJOIN, CONENT and FLAMINGO and peer-reviewed abstracts of the papers to be presented. Moreover, the panel organized in 2013 was highly appreciated by the participants and therefore is proposed to be part of the program in 2014. The speakers of the workshop will form the panel. During the panel session, the presented papers will be used as the starting point for the panel discussions. The programme associated with this workshop is as follows:

Mobile Cloud Infrastructures and Services session (200 minutes + 30 minutes break), Chair Thomas Michael Bohnert (Zurich University of Applied Sciences)

  • Thomas Michael Bohnert (Zurich University of Applied Sciences), Welcome speech: EU FP7 Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) (15 minutes)
  • Anna Tzanakaki (University of Bristol) (Invited paper), Title of invited speech: “EU FP7 CONTENT: Virtualizing converged network infrastructures in support of mobile cloud services” (15 minutes)
  • Peter Rost (NEC) (Invited paper), Title of invited speech: “EU FP7 iJOIN: Benefits and challenges of cloud technologies for ‘5G” (15 minutes)
  • Filip De Turck (University of Gent) (Invited paper), Title of invited speech: “EU FP7 FLAMINGO: Network monitoring in virtualized environments” (15 minutes)
  • Joao Soares (Portugal Telecom Inovacao), Andy Edmonds (Zurich University of Applied Sciences), Giada Landi (Nextworks), Luigi Grossi (Telecom Italia), Julius Mueller (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Frank Zdarsky (NEC Laboratories Europe), Title of presentation: “Cloud computing and SDN networking for end to end virtualization in cloud-based LTE systems” (20 minutes)
  • Desislava Dimitrova (University of Bern), Lucio S. Ferreira (INOV-INESC | IST), André Gomes (University of Bern | One Source, Consultoria Informática Lda.), Navid Nikaein (EURECOM), Alexander Georgiev (CloudSigma), Anna Pizzinat (Orange), Title of presentation: “Challenges ahead of RAN virtualization” (20 minutes)

Coffee Break (30 minutes)

  • Tarik Taleb (NEC Laboratories Europe), Marius Corici (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Carlos Parada (Portugal Telecom Inovacao), Almerima Jamakovic (University of Bern), Simone Ruffino (Telecom Italia), Georgios Karagiannis (University of Twente), Morteza Karimzadeh (University of Twente), Thomas Magedanz (Fraunhofer FOKUS), Title of presentation: “Virtualizing the LTE Evolved Packet Core (EPC)” (20 minutes)
  • André Gomes (University of Bern | One Source, Consultoria Informática Lda.), Santiago Ruiz (Soft Telecom), Giuseppe Carella (TU Berlin / Fraunhofer FOKUS), Paolo Comi (Italtel), Paolo Secondo Crosta (Italtel), Title of presentation: “Cloud-based Orchestration of Multimedia Services and Applications” (20 minutes)

Panel discussions (60 minutes)

Previous Editions

The previous edition of this workshop was entitled: “Mobile Cloud Networking and Edge ICT Services”, and it has been organized during the FUNEMS 2013, http://www.futurenetworksummit.eu/2013/. The duration of the workshop was half a day and has been organised in two sessions. The current edition of this workshop will focus mainly only on one of these sessions, “Mobile Cloud Infrastructures and Services”. The workshop was successful and attracted a relatively high number of attendees compared to other parallel workshops. 25- 50 participants have been permanently in the room at the Mobile Cloud Networking and Edge ICT Services 2013.

Workshop Audience

The target audience will be the telecommunication infrastructures and cloud computing research and industry communities, with an emphasis on European FP7 project involved researchers and organizations. The workshop organizers are participating among others in the EU FP7 IP projects: Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN), CONTENT, iJOIN, FLAMINGO and in Standardization Bodies such as Open Networking Foundation and ETSI NFV (Network Function Virtualisation). It is therefore expected that a significant part of the audience and participants will be the communities involved in Standardization Bodies such as Open Networking Foundation and ETSI NFV and the EU FP7 projects that are and will be cooperating with the EU FP7 IP project “Mobile Cloud Networking” (MCN).

CFP – SI IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine

CALL FOR PAPERS – IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine

Special Issue on Wireless Networking for e-Health Applications
The confluence of electronics miniaturization, information proliferation in healthcare, and novel concepts for energy efficiency and energy scavenging, has pushed the application of Mobile Wireless Networks, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and – perhaps more importantly so – Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) from the realm of theoretical exploration into healthcare reality. This advance heralds in a new era for patient monitoring, medical procedures, patient status awareness, outpatient treatment, and a plethora of other areas in modern healthcare.

Developments in component miniaturization of electronics and sensing devices, advances in low-power wireless communication, and the arrival of energy harvesting have led to the development of ultra-low power wireless communication and sensing devices that are ideally suited for mobile healthcare applications. These devices can be installed in medical facilities and equipment, or worn directly on a patient’s body, allowing for real-time data acquisition, data fusion, reporting, and alerting from a plethora of sources. This allows for an unprecedented level of insight into a patient’s health, with a similarly high level of fidelity of the collected data that in many cases is sufficient to allow biometric identification of
an individual.
With the advent of these new e-Health applications and their associated requirements and constraints, many vital topics of research need to be
explored to provide robustness, security, responsiveness, and longevity of the wireless network and patient health information. This special issue
focuses on the state-of-the-art in wireless networking for e-Health applications, associated technical and regulatory challenges, as well as
exploring deployments and implementations in real-world applications.

The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
– Applications of Wireless Networks in e-Health
– Real-World e-Health environments from design to operation – experiences, problems, and insights
– Cross-Layer Design for e-Health applications
– The PHY Layer of WSN, WBAN, and other e-Health Wireless Networks
– MAC and Routing in e-Health Wireless Networks
– Privacy, Security and Trust for e-Health applications
– Biometrics using WBANs and its applications
– Ensuring Energy Efficiency
– Energy Harvesting for low-power wireless networking in e-Health applications
– RF Interference and Coexistence
– Mobility in e-Health applications
– Modeling, Simulation, and Performance Evaluation for e-Health technologies
– Collaborative, Opportunistic, and Cognitive Wireless Technology in e-Health
– Trends, Future Applications and Research Challenges for Wireless Networks in e-Health
– Regulatory Challenges and Commercialization of e-Health solutions
– Data Collection, Data Storage, Data Sharing, and Cloud Services for e-Health
– Analysis of e-Health products for compliance, security, performance

Manuscript Submission
Authors are invited to submit original scientific articles for review. Only original papers that have not been published or submitted for publication
elsewhere will be considered. Papers should be tutorial in nature to help non-expert readers gain a good understanding of the topic. The papers should also discuss recent advances and future research topics. For further details, please refer to „Submission Guidelines“ in IEEE Wireless
Communications Magazine website at:
http://www.comsoc.org/wirelessmag/paper-submission-guidelines. Authors must follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine guidelines for preparation of the manuscript and submit it via Manuscript Central

http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ieee-wcm, selecting „Wireless Networking for e-Health Applications“ as the topic.

Submission Schedule
Manuscript Submission: January 11, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: April 1, 2013
Final Manuscripts Due: July 1, 2013
Publication Date: August, 2013

Guest Editors
Hamid Sharif
Director, Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory University of
Nebraska – Lincoln, USA
email: hsharif@unl.edu

Michael Hempel
Associate Director, Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory
University of Nebraska – Lincoln, USA
email: mhempel2@unl.edu

Bernd Blobel
Director, eHealth Competence Center
University of Regensburg Medical Center, Germany
email:
bernd.blobel@klinik.uni-regensburg.de

Thomas Michael Bohnert
Director, ICCLab
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
email: thomas.bohnert@zhaw.ch

Ali Khoynezhad
Director, Thoracic Aortic Surgery
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA
email: ali.khoynezhad@cshs.org

On the TPC of the Second Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) Workshop (co-loc with ACM SIGCOM 2013)

Second Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) Workshop
Topics
MCC service architecture and designs
MCC data and storage architecture
MCC performance evaluation and measurement of MCC services and applications
MCC software development platform and enabled new applications
MCC service platform and Quality of Experience (QoE) studies
MCC content/context-based sensing, routing, and networking
MCC security and privacy protection
MCC data and information management for MCC service providers and users
MCC supported social media and networks, virtual community and virtual humans
MCC supported multimedia services, advertisements, games, and entertainments
MCC cloud-on-chip and chip-to-cloud designs and service models
MCC Virtualization and programmable infrastructure
MCC enabled individual, crowdsourcing-based sensing for application scenarios, such as environment monitoring, energy preservation, intelligent transportation, smart grid/home, healthcare and monitoring, personal cloud, ad hoc cloud, mission-critical cloud, collaborative surveillance, etc.

Submission Instructions
All submissions must be original work not under review at any other workshop, conference, or journal. The workshop will accept papers describing completed work as well as work-in-progress, so long as the promise of the approach is demonstrated. Radical ideas, potentially of a controversial nature, are strongly encouraged. Submissions must be no greater than 6 pages in length and must be a PDF file. Reviews will be single-blind: authors name and affiliation should be included in the submission. Submissions must follow the formatting guidelines at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

Papers should be submitted via the submission site: http://mcc13.mobicloud.asu.edu/. Papers must include the author name and affiliation for single-blind peer reviewing by the program committee. Authors of accepted papers are expected to present their papers at the workshop.

Important Dates
Paper Registration March 18, 2013
Paper Submission March 25, 2013
Author Notification April 26, 2013
Camera Ready May 27, 2013
Workshop Date August 12, 2013

How to Run a Large Scale European Research Project

mcn_logo_psimoes_new

Download Slides

The MobileCloud Networking project started 1st of November 2012. It took us two attempts, call 5 and then call 8, but the second was successful and at the end it was worth the effort.

Indeed, given the number of attempts and successes (3 out of 10 and roughly 8 every 12 month) in that category, I am very proud (as coordinator and editor of the proposal and now technical coordinator of the project) of what I achieved with the help of the consortium.

Good proposal writing is very competitive, demanding, and linked to ambition. But the challenging part is starting now. Will we be able to live up to our ambitions? Or will we end up in a spirit that is sufficient to get over the reviews and at the same time remains cosy enough to avoid friction related to ambitions and ultimately impact? Will we be able to go the extra mile?

I am asking for a specific reason. There is lot’s of complaining all over the place, too much overhead, too much paper work, useless deliverables, too much reporting, too little impact, under performance, too large consortia, too small consortia, wrong consortia, strict leadership, wrong leadership, poor leadership, cultural issues, and and and, too this and too that … the glass is half empty. One could wonder why there are so many proposals (the number keeps rising steadily) if there are so many downsides.

My theory is that, besides all the complains, it’s still frequently enough a very cosy environment. Indeed, if you compare research projects with real (business) customer projects you’ll find that the latter are way more strict; in terms of deliverable deadlines, related expectations by customers, quality requirements and so forth.

There are justified reasons for this. Research needs liberty; it’s not a pre-production grade solution delivery function. Also, collaborative research projects are very pragmatic joint ventures where partners join mostly for individual objectives driven out of company strategies (in the industrial case) and not necessarily for the entire vision of the project. This is understandable, the entire nature of writing proposals is a huge compromise and the result always the smallest common denominator, thus never fully strategic to one or the other partner.

But given this, here is the question. How do you run such a project? Do you compromise on the vision and ambition of the proposal in order to provide maximum room to exploit the project as an ideal platform for individual objectives?

Or to put the project in the center and to push for a common vision and respective commitment and frequently compromise by each partner. Of course the right approach is to find a balance of the two.

But how to warrant quality? What is quality?

And here is the paradox. All the complains about quality and impact of collaborative projects would theoretically imply that the project is in the center (mind, in the center, but not the only perspective). But this is very rarely the case, at the end what dominates is commonly the individual interests and the project interests come second. This leads to very „pragmatic, not over-engineerd“ approaches in the project and then, ultimately, another seed all the complains listed above. It’s a home made problem that goes beyond any spirit of science – with ambition, challenge, endurance, and commitment being defining principles.

I used to say „better to have friction during the proposal and a project at the end, than a good time during proposal writing and spare time thereafter“. This is now complemented with „better to have ambition, friction and reward versus a good time plus a CD of documents and some software version 0.0001 alpha in the shelf“. In other words, ambition and challenge comes first. In case of doubt, just double-check your shelves …

This all isn’t anything new, at least I keep sharing whenever I find opportunity. When consequently thought through it comes down to motivation of involved scientists, which is a result of personal, organizational, and contextual interests. And lot’s of emphasis is nowadays paid to so-called intrinsic motivation – albeit this phenomena apply mostly beyond blue-collar domains. Volunteered contributions need to be valued; cause they are rare?

I tend to agree with this but wonder to what extent this is realistic. In this post’s context, the gross of staff deployed joins projects late, way after proposal idea definition and more over, writing. A good match of project scope and interest and expertise is thus subject to random factors and not always met. Another, related aspect is that most of us wear several hats, naturally, and thus face priority scheduling.

Both features do not impair motivation per se, but related them environmental factors. Yet genuine intrinsic motivation does not rely on external triggers but is founded on principle. What I have to do I do right. This is why I believe that challenge and ambitious goal setting is more important. Intrinsically motivated researchers will be ready to go for the extra mile and get over obstacles. One very nice example for this is the Open Source Software community and there competitive structures, there is hardly anything like praise or reward, especially not financially. It’s about true belief in the mission. Another related example is the admiration of Steve Jobs, which is well-known from his immense ambition and consequence in implementing it.

For all those now claiming that this is impractical or simply unrealistic in the context of collaborative research projects. Sorry, it’s not, it’s simply up to the people’s ambition. In belief in what you do and the willingness to go after it by principle.

During the Kick-off Meeting of the MobileCloud Networking project I did present this/my vision. Here are the slides (How to run a Large-Scale Collaborative Research Project). Comments welcome.

1st IEEE Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013)

The 1st Workshop on Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN 2013) will be held in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Communications 2013 (ICC 2013) on June 9-13, 2013, in Budapest, Hungary, see also:
http://mcn2013.unibe.ch/

The workshop will bring together researchers, engineers and users, who are interested in future mobile telecommunication networks and/or cloud computing applications and enabling technologies. MCN will discuss recent trends in telecommunication networks and cloud computing and will in particular focus on challenges to be solved when integrating these technologies as well as possible synergies of these technologies.

Access to cloud storage and computing service via wireless/mobile networks should be optimized in terms of delay, bandwidth and energy consumption from an end user perspective. Moreover, there is an increasing trend to implement more and more functions of a mobile telecommunication network in software, e.g., for signal and protocol processing. This enables to use cloud computing infrastructures as processing platform for signal and protocol processing of mobile telecommunication networks, in particular for current and future generation mobile telecommunication networks. In particular, the integration of protocol and application/service processing allows several opportunities to optimize performance of cloud applications and services observed by the mobile user, whose device is connected to the cloud via wireless access networks.

The workshop solicits original contributions in the topics of interest for the workshop. Those topics include but are not limited to the following:
Protocols and wireless network technologies for mobile cloud applications
Network virtualization for mobile cloud networks
Energy-saving at mobile end systems in network elements supporting mobile cloud applications
Distributed mobility management, including mobility prediction
Future Internet architectures and protocols for mobile cloud computing, including content-centric / context-based networking
Network and protocol support for delay-tolerant applications
Cloud computing in opportunistic networks
Management and allocation of mobile cloud resources, including SLA management
Cloud service management and migration
Seamless handover support for mobile cloud applications
Resource and service monitoring in mobile cloud networks
Physical radio resource sharing
End-to-end performance of mobile cloud applications
Novel cloud-based implementation architectures for mobile communication networks
Quality-of-Experience in mobile cloud applications
Cloud-based applications and services for mobile users, including social networks
(Participatory) sensing and mobile cloud applications, including data aggregation
Security and privacy issues of mobile cloud computing, including authentication and authorization
Accounting and charging of mobile cloud services
Testbeds and performance evaluation for mobile cloud networking and applications
Paper Submission and Author Guidelines
=======================================

Papers must be submitted via the EDAS submission site at http://edas.info/N13433 or at https://edas.info/newPaper.php?c=12627 by selecting the ICC’13 – IEEE ICC’13 – Workshop MCN. Please follow carefully the submission guidelines below. These are also available at IEEE International Conference on Communications 2013 (ICC 2013).

Papers should be written in English with a standard length of five (5) printed pages (10-point font) including figures, without incurring additional page charges (maximum 1 additional page with extra charge if accepted). You may use the standard IEEE Transactions templates for Microsoft Word or LaTeX formats found at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/pubs/transactions/stylesheets.html. Alternatively you can follow the sample instructions in template.pdf at http://www.comsoc.org/confs/globecom/2008/template.pdf. Only PDF files are accepted for paper review. You submitted PDF file and registered EDAS account of a paper must list the same author(s), title and abstract (minor wording differences in the abstract are ok). Papers where the PDF and EDAS account do not match the author(s), title, and/or abstract will be withdrawn by the Technical Program Co-Chairs or Symposium Co-Chairs.

Important Dates

Paper Registration – January, 4th 2013

Full paper submission – January, 11th 2013

Notification – February 22th, 2013

Camera-ready papers – March 8th, 2013

Steering Committee
==================
Thomas Michael Bohnert, ZHAW, Switzerland
Torsten Braun, University of Bern, Switzerland
Marcus Brunner, Swisscom, Switzerland
Edmundo Monteiro, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Georgios Karagiannis, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Workshop Chairs
==============
Torsten Braun, University of Bern, Switzerland,
Luis M. Correia, IST-Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal,
Georgios Karagiannis, University of Twente, the Netherlands,
Edmundo Monteiro, University of Coimbra, Portugal,
Almerima Jamakovic-Kapic, University of Bern, Switzerland

Co-chairing ONIT 2013 @ IFIP/IEEE IM 2013

About ONIT
The 5th ONIT workshop is co-located at the 13th IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM2013), which will take place in 2013 in the historical city centre of Ghent, Belgium. IM 2013 will be held 27-31 May 2013 at Ghent University, Belgium and the ONIT workshop will take place on Friday, May 31, 2013.

This year’s theme: „Hot Topics in Fixed and Mobile Next Generation Network Evolution“

Fixed and mobile broadband networks are constantly under transition. The Internet influence, namely the all-IP transition has led to major changes in the control and service protocols and platforms. The resulting fixed and mobile NGNs are being rolled out globally today and their current evolution is inspired by Over-The-Top (OTT) multimedia services and emerging M2M services. The convergence of different networking domains demands for standardized solutions in order to enable an open “plug&play” multivendor environment.

The Future Internet is globally considered a hot research topic leading to even more drastic changes in these network architectures and technologies. In order to stimulate research and development in these complex environments and the prototyping and validation of new concepts, algorithms, protocols, services open testbeds and experimentation platforms, as well as open source software tools are of key importance.

The Open NGN and IMS Testbeds (ONIT) workshop is an established and vivid international community, which has been sparked by the Open IMS project in the context of NGN in 2009 and has evolved with the related developments, such as OpenEPC for mobile broadband networks and the upcoming OpenMTC toolkit for emerging M2M platforms. As these pioneering testbed toolkits are just examples, there is much more available around the globe, which should be captured by the ONIT workshop.

The 5th Workshop on Open NGN and IMS Testbed workshop 2013 (ONIT@IM2013) will give insights into the state-of-the-art technologies concerning open Next Generation Fixed and Mobile Broadband Packet Core Networks and testbeds at an international scale. A special focus of the 5th ONIT workshop lies on discussing challenges and opportunities of virtualizing telecommunication network technologies and applying SDN concepts on them. The objective is also to evaluate and share the experience on the quality and impact of such testbeds in order to improve current offerings and position them for future challenges. Therefore methodologies, mechanisms, concepts and research results, which address the design, deployment, prototyping and evaluation of Next Generation Fixed and Mobile Broadband Packet Core Networks, their evolution towards Future Internet and related application domains are target.

Especially, the role of and requirements from open source software for Next Generation Fixed and Mobile Broadband Networks testbeds, as well as how such software and infrastructures can provide the required middleware between radio technologies like GSM, UMTS, HSPA, LTE, WiMAX or Wireless LAN and Future Internet as well as Machine-to-Machine communication networks, shall be discussed in depth. Also in scope will be the latest developments into standardization and research on topics related to Next Generation Broadband Networks, like the integration between IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and new all-IP converged network technologies as Evolved Packet Core (EPC) based networks, with special insight on how cost-effective and accelerated R&D on Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) can happen on traditionally difficult fields with the help of open testbeds.

Submission Guidelines and Publication
Authors are invited to submit original contributions (written in English) in PDF format through JEMS using ONIT 2013 Submission Page (NOW OPEN). Only original papers that have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere can be submitted. Each submission will be limited to 8 pages (full papers) or 4 pages (short papers) in the following Formatting Instructions. The review process is single blinded (author names should be mentioned). Self-plagiarized papers will be rejected without further review.

To be published in the IFIP/IEEE IM 2013 Conference Proceedings and IEEE Xplore®, an author of an accepted paper is required to register for the conference at the full or limited (member or non-member) rate and the paper must be presented at the conference. Non-refundable registration fees must be paid prior to uploading the final IEEE formatted, publication-ready version of the paper. For authors with multiple accepted papers, one full or limited registration is valid for up to 3 papers. Accepted and presented papers will be published in the IFIP/IEEE IM 2013 Conference Proceedings and IEEE Xplore®.

Notes from the IM2013 organizing commitee:

There will be one shared ISBN number (from IFIP) for main conference & all workshop proceedings
Proceedings of main conference & all workshops will be on a single stick.
All workshop papers will be published in IEEE Xplore
Note that we do not allow adding new authors to be added after the paper is accepted (potential conflict of interest)
Changing the order of authors or changing paper title is OK.
Registration of a workshop: 159 Euro in combination with IM / 279 Euro without IM

Venue and Accomodation
ONIT 2013 is a workshop held in conjunction with 13th IFIP/IEEE Symposium on Integrated Network and Service Management (IM 2013). For detailed venue, registration, accomodation and visa information, please refer to the IM 2013 website.

In Quest of the „Open Cloud“ (updated)

A remarkable and wonderful feature of Zurich is its vivid computer science and technology community. Hardly any week passes without an interesting event around new innovations and technologies, like the Internet of Things, novel programming languages (Go, etc), security, and of course Cloud Computing technologies (e.g. MongoDB) [footnote1]. Particularly interesting – from our / ICCLab perspective – is the ZhGeeks (@zhgeeks) community, run by one of our fellow technology and cloud evangelists Muharem. Last weeks Zhgeeks meeting was about Open Cloud and no less prominent figure than Samj was about to update us on the Open Cloud Initiative. A truly inspiring talk  (download slides).

Notwithstanding of Sam’s comprehensive and sound introduction into the world of „Cloud Openness“ (from an OCI perspective) I can’t help but have to ask myself – hellya, what is this Open Cloud thing?

So let’s see what the universal oracle has to tell [footnote2]. And here we go. „Open Clouds“ all over; what a surprise. So again, what is it then?

Indeed, this is an interesting question if you bet on CC, either as adopter, contributor, or simply user. As Sam summed it up, „Open Cloud is about technology openness such that the market can drive it’s evolution“, reflecting the OCI definition and principles:

Open Cloud must meet the following requirements:

  • Open Formats: All user data and metadata must be represented in Open Standard formats.
  • Open Interfaces: All functionality must be exposed by way of Open Standard interfaces.“

Having sacrificed several hours of sleep for studying the OpenStack Foundation bylaws in order to understand the implications on OpenStack’s future (you my call it „openness“) – see my earlier blog post Open- or NotSo-OpenStack? – I was wondering whether OCI’s definition also poses open governance requirements onto OSS Cloud Computing projects, like OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus and the likes, but this is seemingly not the case.

Red Hat’s Open Cloud definition goes further by not only requesting open source, standards, and interfaces, but also incorporating „technical governance“ into „The Open Cloud: Red Hat’s Perspective“. It says „An Open Cloud …

Has a viable, independent community. Open source isn’t just about the code, its license, and how it can be used and extended. At least as important is the community associated with the code and how it’s governed. Realizing the collaborative potential of open source and the innovation it can deliver to everyone means having the structures and organization in place to tap it fully.“

Another popular reference is the Open Cloud Manifesto, which defines a set of open cloud principles, similar to OCI but focuses further on features of an open cloud and the defining community, in particular by embracing the fact that Cloud Computing is a community effort,  that different stakeholder groups exist, and that these ought to collaborate to avoid fragmentation.

„6. Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap.“
RackSpace, notably one of the founding members of OpenStack, has too an opinion; „Open Cloud Computing : History of Open Source Coding and the Open Cloud“ – in this post exclusively linked to Open Source Software.
Alex Williams from TechCruch „spend some time with the technologists at CloudOpen – the Linux Foundation’s first cloud only event“ and summarizes in his article „To sum it up: if VMworld is about the data center then CloudOpen is about the software“ and continues „Over the past few days, I’ve tried to crystallize the conversation to some extent. Here is my take:
  • An open cloud has open APIs.
  • An open cloud has a developer community that collaborates on developing the cloud infrastructure or platform environment.
  • An open cloud has people who have deep experience in running open source projects.
  • An open cloud gives users the rights to move data as wished.
  • An open cloud is federated — you can run your apps and data across multiple cloud environments.
  • An open cloud does not require an IT administrator to provision and manage.
  • An open cloud does not require new hardware.
  • An open cloud is not a rat’s nest of licenses.
  • An open cloud is not a proprietary, new age mainframe.
  • An open cloud is not washed with marketing.
  • An open cloud can be forked.
  • An open cloud has full view into the infrastructure environment.
  • An open cloud is not hosted, legacy software
David Linthicum seems to share equal motivations which led me to this blog post. He tells in his post „InfoWorld: The ‚open cloud‘ is getting awfully confusing“. The article does not go into detail but nicely summarizes the status quo:
„If you’re looking at adopting an „open cloud“ technology, you have complex work ahead. Assessing their value is complicated by the fact that many of the vendors are less than a two years old and have a minimal install base that can provide insight into fit, issues, and value.

As with any significant IT endeavor, you need to do your homework, understand your requirements, and make sure to test this stuff well before you use it in your enterprise. At some point, the „open cloud“ market will normalize, and when that happens, you hope your seat will still be available in the ensuing game of musical chairs.“

 from Gigao picks up this thread, citing Alex and David, for his „Prediction: More Cloud Confusion Ahead„.

Alex Williams from TechCruch cites the CloudOpen conference as trigge and here goes a summary of the discussions, 10 Insights from Linux Leaders in the Open Cloud.

Richard Kaufmann, chief technologist, HP Cloud Services, July 3, 2012, „HP Public Cloud Aims to Boost OpenStack Customer Base.“There are two important APIs out there, one is Amazon’s and the other is OpenStack. And OpenStack has Amazon compatibility. HP will continue to support those Amazon compatibility layers; We’re not trying to lead on a position about what customers should do with APIs… I (personally) believe there should be a popular cloud API for IaaS and it should not be Amazon. It could be anything else but it can’t float from above. It has to be based on popular usage.

Lew Moorman, Rackspace, July 10, 2012, „Open Cloud Key to Modern Networking.“Some people seem to think that APIs are the cloud and one thing that made the cloud so revolutionary is it’s programmatically accessible by API.  But (Amazon) S3 is a really complex distributed system. The issue with a model that says “clone Amazon” is that, unless you have the core technology underneath it, you can’t have a cloud…

OpenStack is really setting out to build an open alternative from end to end. They say we’re going to do networking, not just set out to copy Amazon. We need to really innovate and build a visionary system that can power the future of computing. Amazon, VMware and Microsoft don’t have all the answers.

Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode, July 17, 2012, „Chef Offers a Recipe for the Open Source Cloud.“The open cloud lies both below and above the waterline of the API. At the beginning we all wanted to treat the cloud as an easier way to get the compute units that looked like the old thing we used to get buying a physical machine. But that’s not actually true. It’s not the same thing and it requires a different design underneath of a common substrate. If you look above the water line at the consumer, the way you build applications, the way they scale, etc., designing the cloud and for the cloud are different than what is now legacy.

Mark Hinkle, senior director of cloud computing community, Citrix July 24, 2012, „Citrix’s Hinkle Proposes Linux Model for an Open Source Cloud.It’s first and foremost that the orchestration platform is open source. The data you store within the cloud is open to you as the end user in a format you can manipulate easily and it’s easily transferable. The API is also open and clearly documented.

Ross Turk, vice president of community, InkTank, July 31, 2012, „An Open Source Storage Solution for the Enterprise.It can mean a cloud stack that is built on open source like OpenStack or CloudStack and that reflects the economic and community advantages behind building something that’s akin to what Amazon has done, but built on commodity hardware. It’s an open alternative to AWS. Another way to think of the open cloud doesn’t exclude AWS. It’s having cloud services with standardized APIs so applications written for one cloud can work on another cloud.

Imad Sousou, director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, Aug. 7, 2012, „Open Cloud Standards will Emerge With More Collaboration.“The open cloud must meet these requirements:  Use Open Formats, where all user data and metadata must be represented in Open Standard formats. Use Open Interfaces, where functionality must be exposed through Open Standard interfaces. In addition, in the open cloud, various open source technologies should be available to build the right solutions efficiently, and to drive innovation. These would include software stack and tools, such as the hypervisors or operating systems, middleware, such as databases and web servers, web content management systems, and development tools and languages. Such open source-based software solutions would reinforce interoperability of the open cloud.

Kyle MacDonald, vice president of cloud, Canonical, Aug. 14, 2012, „Canonical: Making the Open Cloud Seamless for Users.True power comes when the users can move from one cloud service to another. That’s the state of nirvana. The cool word is ‘interoperability.’ …  It will be almost required that if you’re a cloud service you publish an API that’s clear. And eventually there will be a common API or it becomes so simple the minor differences won’t be a big deal to end users. And then partners who define the services can use those same open source technologies and provide a good service.

Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source, SUSE Aug. 21, 2012, „SUSE Aims for One-Click Enterprise Deployment on OpenStack.Enterprise IT must deliver the most efficient, scalable and flexible services possible. The open cloud provides that through the ability to have a flexible infrastructure, quick and easy deployment, service management and complete life cycle management. We’re working with partners — many are part of these open source projects – to build this together and that builds interoperability. It’s a collaboration of ideas as well as code. It accelerates bringing a solution to market that works across all the different partners.

Angel Diaz, vice president of software standards and cloud, IBM Aug. 28, 2012, „3 Projects Creating User-Driven Standards for the Open Cloud.“ Our clients who use technology have a heterogeneous environment. They need to take existing systems, extend them and deal with it and they don’t want to be locked into a singe vendor solution. That is how (IBM) defines an open cloud: where end users want to have these points of interoperability.

Joe Brockmeier, open source cloud computing evangelist, Citrix Sept. 6, 2012, „Defining the Open Cloud.Some folks will argue that a cloud service or offering is open if it has open APIs and open standards.  For my money, the best definition of the open cloud came from Red Hat’s Scott Crenshaw: It enables portability across clouds; Has a pluggable, extensible, and open API; Lets you deploy to your choice of infrastructure; It’s unencumbered by patents and other IP restrictions; It’s based on open standards; It has a viable and independent community; It is open source. Having open APIs is necessary, but it’s not enough. If you depend on one vendor to provide your cloud, and you can’t pull it in-house for any reason, it’s just not open.

So are we any smarter after this, only little I fear. There are common themes, like open source, standards, interfaces, royalty-freeness from a technology ankle and freedom of choice and cross-cloud portability on the other. And perhaps the community should indeed take this one Open Cloud Manifesto principle on „open cloud community collaboration“ to heart and drive consolidation; instead of contributing to one of those fundamental innovation hindrances that they try to avoid, that is fragmentation. The CloudOpen conference was one great step into this direction and the Google Hangout on OpenClouds (on Youtube) by Ben Kepes (Ben Kepes on G+) will hopefully be another way to continue this important discussion.

ANNEX

Open Cloud InitiativeOpen Cloud Principles (OCP)

Interoperability (the ability to exchange and use information) between cloud computing products and services is required for unfettered competition between vendors and unrestricted choice for users.

Users must be able to come (no barriers to entry) and go (no barriers to exit) regardless of who they are (no discrimination) and what systems they use (technological neutrality).

Supporting vendors must therefore cooperate on standards, implementing those that exist (where applicable) and collaborating via an open process to develop those that don’t, with a view to competing fairly on quality.
Open Cloud must meet the following requirements:
  • Open Formats: All user data and metadata must be represented in Open Standard formats.
  • Open Interfaces: All functionality must be exposed by way of Open Standard interfaces.

Open Standards must meet the following requirements:

  • Copyrights: The standard must be documented in all its details, published and both accessible and [re]usable free of charge.
  • Patents: Any patents possibly present on [parts of] the standard must be irrevocably made available on a royalty-free basis.
  • Trademarks: Any trademarks possibly present on identifier(s) must be used for non-discriminatory enforcement of compliance only.
  • Implementations: There must be multiple full, faithful, independent and interoperable implementations (for both client and server where applicable) and at least one such implementation must be licensed in its entirety under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license or placed into the public domain.

Red Hat : An open cloud has the following characteristics:

  • Is open source. This allows adopters to control their particular implementation and doesn’t restrict them to the technology and business roadmap of a specific vendor. It lets them build and manage clouds that put them in control of their own destiny and provides them with visibility into the technology on which they’re basing their business. It provides them with the flexibility to run the workloads of their choice, including proprietary ones, in their cloud. Open source also lets them collaborate with other communities and companies to help drive innovation in the areas that are important to them.
  • Has a viable, independent community. Open source isn’t just about the code, its license, and how it can be used and extended. At least as important is the community associated with the code and how it’s governed. Realizing the collaborative potential of open source and the innovation it can deliver to everyone means having the structures and organization in place to tap it fully.
  • Is based on open standards, or protocols and formats that are moving toward standardization and that are independent of vendor and platform. Standardization in the sense of “official” cloud standards blessed by standards bodies is still in early days. That said, approaches to interoperability that aren’t under the control of individual vendors and that aren’t tied to specific platforms offer important flexibility. This allows the API specification to evolve beyond implementation constraints and creates the opportunity for communities and organizations to develop variants that meet their individual technical and commercial requirements.
  • Freedom to use IP.  Recent history has repeatedly shown that there are few guarantees that intellectual property (IP) assets will remain accessible to all from one day to the next.  To have confidence that you will continue to enjoy access to IP assets that you depend on under the terms that you depend on, permission needs to be given in ways that make that technology open and accessible to the user.  So-called “de facto standards,” which are often “standards” only insofar as they are promoted by a large vendor, often fail this test.
  • Is deployable on your choice of infrastructure. Hybrid cloud management should provide an additional layer of abstraction above virtualization, physical servers, storage, networking, and public cloud providers. This implies, or indeed requires, that cloud management be independent of virtualization and other foundational technologies. This is a fundamental reason that cloud is different from virtualization management and a fundamental enabler of hybrid clouds that span physical servers, multiple virtualization platforms, and a wide range of public cloud providers including top public clouds.
  • Is pluggable and extensible with an open API. This lets users add features, providers, and technologies from a variety of vendors or other sources. Critically, the API itself cannot be under the control of a specific vendor or tied to a specific implementation but must be under the auspices of a third-party organization that allows for contributions and extensions in an open and transparent manner. Deltacloud, an API that abstracts the differences between clouds, provides a good example. It is under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation and is neither a Red Hat-controlled project nor tied to a particular implementation of cloud management.
  • Enables portability to other clouds. Implicit in a cloud approach that provides support for heterogeneous infrastructure is that investments made in developing for an open cloud must be portable to other such clouds. Portability takes a variety of forms including programming languages and frameworks, data, and the applications themselves. If you develop an application for one cloud, you shouldn’t need to rewrite it in a different language or use different APIs to move it somewhere else. Furthermore, a consistent runtime environment across clouds means that retesting and requalification isn’t needed every time you want to redeploy.

Open Cloud Manifesto : Open Cloud Principles

Rather, as cloud computing matures, there are several key principles that must be followed to ensure the cloud is open and delivers the choice, flexibility and agility organizations demand:
1. Cloud providers must work together to ensure that the challenges to cloud adoption (security, integration, portability, interoperability, governance/management, metering/monitoring) are addressed through open collaboration and the appropriate use of standards.
2. Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into heir particular platforms and limit their choice of providers.
3. Cloud providers must use and adopt existing standards wherever appropriate. The IT industry has invested heavily in existing standards and standards organizations; there is no need to duplicate or reinvent them.
4. When new standards (or adjustments to existing standards) are needed, we must be judicious and pragmatic to avoid creating too many standards. We must ensure that standards promote innovation and do not inhibit it.
5. Any community effort around the open cloud should be driven by customer needs, not merely the technical needs of cloud providers, and should be tested or verified against real customer requirements.
6. Cloud computing standards organizations, advocacy groups, and communities should work together and stay coordinated, making sure that efforts do not conflict or overlap.
Leaders of the Open Cloud at OpenCloud

Richard Kaufmann, chief technologist, HP Cloud Services
July 3, 2012, „HP Public Cloud Aims to Boost OpenStack Customer Base.“ 

There are two important APIs out there, one is Amazon’s and the other is OpenStack. And OpenStack has Amazon compatibility. HP will continue to support those Amazon compatibility layers; We’re not trying to lead on a position about what customers should do with APIs… I (personally) believe there should be a popular cloud API for IaaS and it should not be Amazon. It could be anything else but it can’t float from above. It has to be based on popular usage.

Lew Moorman, Rackspace
July 10, 2012, „Open Cloud Key to Modern Networking.“

Some people seem to think that APIs are the cloud and one thing that made the cloud so revolutionary is it’s programmatically accessible by API.  But (Amazon) S3 is a really complex distributed system. The issue with a model that says “clone Amazon” is that, unless you have the core technology underneath it, you can’t have a cloud…

OpenStack is really setting out to build an open alternative from end to end. They say we’re going to do networking, not just set out to copy Amazon. We need to really innovate and build a visionary system that can power the future of computing. Amazon, VMware and Microsoft don’t have all the answers.

Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode
July 17, 2012, „Chef Offers a Recipe for the Open Source Cloud.“ 

The open cloud lies both below and above the waterline of the API. At the beginning we all wanted to treat the cloud as an easier way to get the compute units that looked like the old thing we used to get buying a physical machine. But that’s not actually true. It’s not the same thing and it requires a different design underneath of a common substrate. If you look above the water line at the consumer, the way you build applications, the way they scale, etc., designing the cloud and for the cloud are different than what is now legacy.

Mark Hinkle, senior director of cloud computing community, Citrix
July 24, 2012, „Citrix’s Hinkle Proposes Linux Model for an Open Source Cloud.“ 

It’s first and foremost that the orchestration platform is open source. The data you store within the cloud is open to you as the end user in a format you can manipulate easily and it’s easily transferable. The API is also open and clearly documented.

Ross Turk, vice president of community, InkTank
July 31, 2012, „An Open Source Storage Solution for the Enterprise.“ 

It can mean a cloud stack that is built on open source like OpenStack or CloudStack and that reflects the economic and community advantages behind building something that’s akin to what Amazon has done, but built on commodity hardware. It’s an open alternative to AWS.

Another way to think of the open cloud doesn’t exclude AWS. It’s having cloud services with standardized APIs so applications written for one cloud can work on another cloud.

Imad Sousou, director of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center
Aug. 7, 2012, „Open Cloud Standards will Emerge With More Collaboration.“

The open cloud must meet these requirements:  Use Open Formats, where all user data and metadata must be represented in Open Standard formats. Use Open Interfaces, where functionality must be exposed through Open Standard interfaces.

In addition, in the open cloud, various open source technologies should be available to build the right solutions efficiently, and to drive innovation. These would include software stack and tools, such as the hypervisors or operating systems, middleware, such as databases and web servers, web content management systems, and development tools and languages. Such open source-based software solutions would reinforce interoperability of the open cloud.

Kyle MacDonald, vice president of cloud, Canonical
Aug. 14, 2012, „Canonical: Making the Open Cloud Seamless for Users.“ 

True power comes when the users can move from one cloud service to another. That’s the state of nirvana. The cool word is ‘interoperability.’ …  It will be almost required that if you’re a cloud service you publish an API that’s clear. And eventually there will be a common API or it becomes so simple the minor differences won’t be a big deal to end users. And then partners who define the services can use those same open source technologies and provide a good service.

Alan Clark, director of industry initiatives, emerging standards and open source, SUSE
Aug. 21, 2012, „SUSE Aims for One-Click Enterprise Deployment on OpenStack.“ 

Enterprise IT must deliver the most efficient, scalable and flexible services possible. The open cloud provides that through the ability to have a flexible infrastructure, quick and easy deployment, service management and complete life cycle management.

We’re working with partners — many are part of these open source projects – to build this together and that builds interoperability. It’s a collaboration of ideas as well as code. It accelerates bringing a solution to market that works across all the different partners.

Angel Diaz, vice president of software standards and cloud, IBM
Aug. 28, 2012, „3 Projects Creating User-Driven Standards for the Open Cloud.“ 

Our clients who use technology have a heterogeneous environment. They need to take existing systems, extend them and deal with it and they don’t want to be locked into a singe vendor solution. That is how (IBM) defines an open cloud: where end users want to have these points of interoperability.

Joe Brockmeier, open source cloud computing evangelist, Citrix
Sept. 6, 2012, „Defining the Open Cloud.“ 

Some folks will argue that a cloud service or offering is open if it has open APIs and open standards.  For my money, the best definition of the open cloud came from Red Hat’s Scott Crenshaw: It enables portability across clouds; Has a pluggable, extensible, and open API; Lets you deploy to your choice of infrastructure; It’s unencumbered by patents and other IP restrictions; It’s based on open standards; It has a viable and independent community; It is open source.

Having open APIs is necessary, but it’s not enough. If you depend on one vendor to provide your cloud, and you can’t pull it in-house for any reason, it’s just not open.

FOOTNOTES

[footnote1]  This is symptom and cause, concurrently, for the Zurich’s rise as the European Silicon Valley, as some already claim, based on its flourishing high-tech start-up scene that enjoys a wide array of support and attention (e.g. Zurich Start-Up PortalStartwerk PortalZurich Start-up Weekend, Zurich StartupsStartup.ch).

[footnote2] Apologies to one of my previous employers. I really didn’t mean to mention the evil.

 

Open- or NotSo-OpenStack? – Comments on the OpenStack Foundation

An analysis of the OpenStack Foundation and its technical governance approach. Originally published at the ICCLab

Contributions to Open Source Software (OSS) projects are an excellent means to foster broad uptake of  innovations and has therefore become indispensable for research and development in computer science.

With the Internet allowing ubiquitous collaboration (e.g. between OSS software developers, OSS community managers, OSS document editors, etc) of all sorts, across all backgrounds, and locations spread over the entire globe, some OSS projects are so successful that they reach sizes (and budgets) that are comparable to full-blown companies.

Contributing to OSS is also an unparalleled frank (and in times brutal) means for receiving feedback by an expert community. OSS communities are commonly governed by technical meritocracy, a term inherently subjective and thus reliable warrant of controversy. Contributions are in turn relentlessly scrutinized, the latter not seldom amplified by the fact that the motivation for OSS contribution is reward by community appreciation (instead of financial compensation), a principle that renders OSS environments highly competitive, in particular for highly popular projects like Linux, Apache, OpenStack and the likes.

We, at the ICCLab, consider it paramount to deliver our ideas and innovations as running code to a few carefully selected and relevant OSS projects to get receive feedback that validates our ideas and to ensure that our ideas and innovations gain support and uptake by the community. This is an inherent element of our impact-centric research methodology.

The powers of OSS is exemplified by the OpenStack project. It emerged out of a merger between NASA and Rackspace, who both have developed their own IaaS framework but decided to cooperate for the sake of creating a serious competitor to existing incumbents, like Amazon and VMWare. This initial motivation of the founders continues to materialize and the project enjoys comprehensive community support backed up by significant financial and organizational backing by some of the most influential industry incumbents.

OpenStack meanwhile became (supposedly) the largest OSS project since Linux and reached a size significantly larger than Linux. Such growth pushes organizational structures of any OSS project to the limits. If also imposes a hefty burden onto founding members, for OpenStack in particular onto Rackspace who managed the project from an administrative perspective.

A common way out of this is to transform the organisation into an foundation, like for instance the Apache Foundation  or the Linux Foundation, and this was applied to OpenStack too. With the beginning of September 2012 the OpenStack Foundation is in charge of the OpenStack project. The advantages are evident; professional structures, comprehensive governance, and financial management. All this fosters trust as it leads OpenStack out of a loosly coupled community project into a trustworthy company-style enterprise.

But such industry-grade and -oriented advantages come at a price. While native (pure) OSS projects share powers based on meritocracy, derived from technical  expertise and commitment to the project, foundations are characterized by a significant financial dimension, and the OpenStack Foundation does not make an exception. The difficult part of this is the balanace between professional structures, the financial backing required, and the value (influence) provided to those that are willing to invest cash on one hand, and on the other to preserve the drive and nature of the OSS movement, that is technical liberty and community recognition.

The OpenStack compromise to this issue is documented in the OpenStack Foundation Bylaws. This document lays out the general framework (not to say powers) and thus puts any person and institution committed to OpenStack – just like the ICCLab – in an unequivocal context. The question therefore is: What are the implications of the OpenStack Foundation?

Our initial analysis goes here ICCLab : The OpenStack Project and Foundation

Feedback much welcome!

Invited to talk about Software-defined Networking at the ITU Telecom World 2012

ITU Telecom World 2012 is the leading platform for the global ICT community to connect, debate, network and share knowledge. Key stakeholders from across the entire industry ecosystem will come together in Dubai from 14 -18 October to harness the power of ICTs to create real change. This exclusive Leadership Summit will bring together global leaders responsible for shaping the ICT visions, policies and strategies of the future.

At the core of the World 2012 programme are the Panel Sessions, where leading industry figures engage in lively discussion on the key topics and future trends impacting the world of ICT and the world in general. These trends and topics will each be examined and debated from the three principle perspectives uniquely inherent to the industry: technology, business and policy.

It is therefore a special honour to be invited as Panel Speaker and a great feedback for the ICCLab as such.

From the Invitation Letter:

On behalf of Mr Blaise Judja-Sato, Executive Manager of ITU Telecom, we are pleased to enclose the official invitation letter extended to you by Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, ITU Secretary-General, inviting you to participate in the Forum of ITU Telecom World 2012.

This is a brief description of your panel session:

Open Source Routing Monday 15 October, 15:45-17:00 One of the key drivers of the proliferation of the internet was the adoption of managed open source for the domain name infrastructure (BIND). This enabled an open, interoperable yet affordable internet for all. Today, a similar revolution is happening through trends in the virtualization of network resources such as OpenFlow. Open source routing is a new initiative that will help establish a “platform” supporting committers and communities behind the open source routing protocols. No longer will there be a reliance on equipment vendors’ proprietary hardware and closed software stacks that don’t adapt to rapid changing requirements. Virtualization and open source routing will bring a lot of disruption in the industry and also a lot of new services to the public.

Kindest regards,
ITU TELECOM Place des Nations | CH-1211 Geneva 20 | Switzerland http://world2012.itu.int/

Open access, yes, open publishing, no.

Thoughts on „Open Access“ proposed by the UK and backed by the European Commission.

Taken from the article:
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/07/uk-research-funders-announce-liberated-open-access-policy.html

From April 2013, science papers must be made free to access within six months of publication if they come from work paid for by one of the United Kingdom’s seven government-funded grant agencies,

Science journals have two ways of complying with the policy. They can allow the final peer-reviewed version of a paper to be put into an online repository within six months (green access). Alternatively, publishers may *charge authors* to make research papers open-access up front (gold access).

For ‘gold’ open access, RCUK will pay institutions an annual block grant to support the charges. (…) That might mean that universities and researchers will begin to discuss where they can afford to publish.“

And from this article on the same subject
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Open-Access-Freier-Zugang-zur-britischen-Forschung-1643649.html

„Bis 2014 soll das wissenschaftliche Publikationswesen vom System „subscriber pays“ auf „author pays“ umgestellt werden. “ (by 2014 the system changes from „subscriber pays“ to „author pays“.

„Verlage von den Autoren typischerweise etwa 2000 Pfund Bearbeitungs- und Veröffentlichungskosten zur Freischaltung eines Artikels im Internet erheben“
(About 2000 Pounds per paper to be paid by the author, for the entire process, from receiving the submission, over peer-reviewing, editing, proof-reading, publishsing.)

This approach was proposed by the „Finch Study“.
http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

And here goes an interesting comment on it. Mind the reference to „the collaborative, subsidised model“.
http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/#comment-2121

Professor Tom Wilson says:
11/07/2012 at 10:24

I find two issues in the report that are of concern. The first is that the Working Party seems to have given no attention at all to the model of open access publishing that delivers maximum social benefit; that is, the collaborative, subsidised model, which involves neither subscription nor author charges. This model is now used extensively by new open access journals as may be seen from the contents of the Directory of Open Access Journals. It delivers maximum social benefit, precisely because publication and access are both free – this is the only true open access, or more properly, open publishing. The costs of production are borne either by voluntary labour, or by the academic institution subsidising the work of editors and copy-editors: at present, the true costs of commercial publishing to academic institutions are unknown, since, as far as I am aware no one has carried out the research to determine how much institutions are already paying to support the work of journal editors (some have secretarial support provided by their institution, for example), members of editorial boards, and referees. If these costs were known and set against the costs of creating true openly published journals, the economic benefits of the latter would become even more obvious.

The second issue of concern is related. Why was this model not thoroughly investigated? An examination of the constitution of the Working Party might provide an answer – it contained three member of the commercial publishing industry but no one with experience of open publishing – open access, yes, open publishing, no. When the chief beneficiaries of the present system, who make profits considerably in excess of current business benchmarks, are participants in an examination of their industry, can in be wondered that no really radical model is explored? The publishing industry is the only business I know of that receives its raw material free of charge, receives financial subsidy in the editorial process from the institutions providing that raw material, and then charges excessive subscription costs to the same institutions. The technology now available renders the commercial publisher redundant in the scholarly publishing process and it is only the timidity of government and the academic institutions that prevents the development of radical alternatives.