Our Mission

Mission Statement

The Open Telecom Foundation’s (OTF) mission is:

• to advance the adoption of open source telecommunications technologies based on open standards and open protocols,
• to promote the design and development of reliable and resilient telecommunications platforms using open source and open standards components,
• by educating telecommunications service providers in best practices of building and deploying carrier-grade telecommunications services, and
• by providing technology researchers and software programmers with the development and collaboration tools and resources necessary to contribute to the development, documentation and support of open source and open standards telecommunications projects and initiatives,
• for the public benefit of telecommunications services subscribers, who receive higher-quality, more reliable, greater interoperability and lower cost services when using open source telecommunications technologies based open standards and protocols.

Public Interest Goals:

• To promote excellence in telecommunications for the benefit of the public by conducting research on best practices related to the development, deployment and management of reliable and resilient open source and open standards telecommunications technologies and disseminating the results of the research to the public.
• To promote and maintain efficiency and high standards of practice in reliable and resilient telecommunications for the benefit of the public by developing training materials for, and providing funds and collaboration resources for the training of, individuals engaged in the development of open source and open standards telecommunications technologies.
• To promote excellence and efficiencies in telecommunications for the benefit of the public by establishing and maintaining best practices and standards of workmanship, through the development and institution of an apprenticeship program for development of reliable and resilient open source and open standards telecommunications technologies.

Governance Model

The Open Telecom Foundation was founded as a federal non-profit corporation (Corporation Number: 1030778-5 / Business Number: 706230893RC0001) in Canada on July 4th, 2017. Our international group of founding members selected 7 directors to get our organization up and running.

The Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative and Apache Foundation have all served as inspiration for our existence and helped us create a founding set of Bylaws that guide our members and our collaborations.

Open source is fundamental to our purpose and the Open Telecom Foundation is bound to produce, sponsor, contribute and maintain only open source software. Please see the definitions section of our By-laws where Open Source Initiative’s definition of open source is essential to how the Open Telecom Foundation operates.

The Open Telecom Foundation membership structure and governance are heavily borrowed from those of the Linux Foundation. Like the Linux Foundation, classes of members (Silver, Gold, Platinum) each elect their own class of directors which preside over the Open Telecom Foundation’s Board. Also like to the Linux Foundation, we have structured our annual membership based on the size of the member organization: smaller operators are asked to contribute less and larger operators are asked to contribute more.

It’s important to note one key difference between the Open Telecom Foundation’s governance model and the Linux Foundation’s governance model: the Open Telecom Foundation favours more control in the hands of smaller members (Silver) whereas the Linux Foundation favours more control in the hands of larger (Gold, Platinum) members. Like our commitment to open source, this difference is key to our motivations to keep grass-roots involvement prominent.