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MEF LSO Hackathon at Euro16 brings together open source, open standards

hackathonThe MEF recently conducted its second LSO Hackathon at a Rome event called Euro16. You can read my story about it here in DiarioTi: LSO Hackathons Bring Together Open Standards, Open Source.

Alas, my coding skills are too rusty for a Hackathon, unless the objective is to develop a fully buzzword compliant implementation of “Hello World.” Fortunately, there are others with better skills, as well as a broader understanding of today’s toughest problems.

Many Hackathons are thinly veiled marketing exercises by companies, designed to find ways to get programmers hooked on their tools, platforms, APIs, etc. Not all! One of the most interesting Hackathons is from the MEF, an industry group that drives communications interoperability. As a standards defining organization (SDO), the MEF wants to help carriers and equipment vendors design products/services ready for the next generation of connectivity. That means building on a foundation of SDN (software defined networks), NFV (network functions virtualization), LSO (lifecycle service orchestration) and CE2.0 (Carrier Ethernet 2.0).

To make all this happen:

  • What the MEF does: Create open standards for architectures and specifications.
  • What vendors, carriers and open source projects do: Write software to those specifications.
  • What the Hackathon does: Give everyone a chance to work together, make sure the code is truly interoperable, and find areas where the written specs might be ambiguous.

Thus, the MEF LSO Hackathons. They bring together a wide swatch of the industry to move beyond the standards documents and actually write and test code that implements those specs.

As mentioned above, the MEF just completed its second Hackathon at Euro16. The first LSO Hackathon was at last year’s MEF GEN15 annual conference in Dallas. Here’s my story about it in Telecom Ramblings: The MEF LSO Hackathon: Building Community, Swatting Bugs, Writing Code.

The third LSO Hackathon will be at this year’s MEF annual conference, MEF16, in Baltimore, Nov. 7-10. I will be there as an observer – alas, without the up-to-date, practical skills to be a coding participant.