First meeting of the future Open Telecom Foundation

All 7 of the OTF founding volunteer board member, and attending co-workers, first met together in person in the evening of October 18th, 2016 in San Francisco, USA after attending the KazooCon 2016 conference hosted by Kazoo primary authors 2600Hz.

In our first ad-hoc meeting, we discussed the various open source contributions we were individually intending to contribute to Kazoo, Kamailio, FreeSWITCH, CouchDB, RabbitMQ and other key telecom projects.

Specifically, with respect to 2600Hz’s Kazoo, we acknowledged that, as members of the open source community, we would need to combine and focus our efforts to continue to support the open source Kazoo call centre module ACDc (Automated Call Distribution Commander) which had been originally authored by James Aimonetti at 2600Hz. At KazooCon 2016, combined with the announcement of the new closed source call center module Qubicle, 2600Hz had announced that ACDc would continue on in Kazoo only as a community supported initiative. All 7 of the founding OTF members had either been running Kazoo ACDc in production or were planning to run Kazoo ACDc in production.

With continuing to support Kazoo ACDc as imperative, we pulled-up our sleeves and started to discover ways we could collaborate. Instead of continuing to operate in individual silos, duplicating work and wasting precious resources, we began discussing ways that we could coordinate our efforts. Many different models of collaboration were discussed. As we realized that our collaboration would need to be neutral and independent of each of our individual organizations, the ideal of creating a non-profit foundation began to take shape.