By Gergely Csatári Senior Specialist, Open Source Program Office at Nokia | ONE Summit Programming Committee Member

I have been involved with open source in telecom for close to two decades now, from the early days of moving off vendor-specific hardware, through OpenStack, and into the cloud native and Kubernetes world we work in today. Over the years I have sat on both sides of a CFP: submitting proposals myself, and previously, as a member of the Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONE Summit) Programming Committee, reading and reviewing them. That gives me a decent vantage point on what actually makes a proposal worth accepting, and I want to share some of that here, along with why I think this year’s ONE Summit is worth your time.

This year’s theme is A New Global Era: Agentic AI, Edge AI, and Open Networking, and it is not just a catchy title. We are at the point where agentic AI, edge intelligence, and open, programmable networks are no longer separate workstreams competing for attention. They are becoming one connected effort, and that is exactly the kind of shift that open source is good at absorbing, because no single vendor or team can figure it out alone. Hosted alongside Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo this December, the Summit puts telecom operators, cloud providers, silicon vendors, and the engineers actually writing the code in the same rooms and hallways.

Why This CFP Is Worth Your Time 

Having served on the review side of a CFP before, I can tell you the sessions that stick with people are almost never the ones describing an idealized architecture diagram. They are the ones where someone explains what happened when they actually tried to run something at scale, including where it broke, what they had to rework, and what they would do differently next time. If your team has been pushing agentic operations, AI-RAN, edge inference, or intent-based networking from a proof-of-concept into something closer to production, that is precisely the kind of experience this community is short on.

There is also a more practical reason to submit. The sessions that get accepted at ONE Summit influence the working groups and projects that follow. The sessions trigger hallway discussions, make connections and eventually shape the future of the technology. If you want a say in where the open source ecosystem goes next, rather than just reacting to decisions made elsewhere, presenting here is one of the more direct ways to do it.

Four Themes, One Roadmap 

The CFP is organized around four themes this year, and together they cover the full stack of what we are dealing with, from the architecture itself, to its consequences, to how it gets deployed at the edge, to the underlying network work that makes all of it possible.

Open & AI-Native Networking & Edge treats AI and open networking as a single roadmap: agentic AI and intent-based networking, AIOps, multi-agent orchestration, autonomous network operations, and cloud-native agentic networks proven out through real deployments.

AI’s Implications on Networks, and Networks’ Implications on Enterprise, Government & Verticals covers the second-order effects: security and trust in AI-driven networks, open source governance, regulation and global policy, and the hardware layer underneath it all, SmartNICs, DPUs, optical switching, and quantum-safe networking.

Edge AI & Data at the Edge is where inference meets the physical world: model deployment and data processing at the edge, industrial and automotive use cases, and the open source platforms that make edge deployments repeatable across IIOT and OT/IT environments.

Network Evolution: Open Source and the Path Forward covers the deeper technical groundwork required at scale: AI-RAN software and silicon, AI-native 6G architecture, non-terrestrial and satellite networks, and the intelligent control layers, xApps, rApps, dApps, that let networks act on their own.

My advice from having sat on the evaluator side of the session selection process: pick the theme your work actually belongs to and go deep, rather than trying to stretch one proposal to fit all four. A submission that clearly fits one theme, with real depth, reads far better than one that tries to touch everything.

What Makes a Strong Proposal 

A few things I looked for when reviewing submissions, and that I would encourage anyone submitting to keep in mind:

• Start from the operational problem, not the architecture. “How we handled congestion in a highly loaded sector” tells a reviewer more than “we built an orchestration layer.” We want to understand the problem before we evaluate the solution.
• Be precise about where you actually are. Production deployment, live pilot, or early proof-of-concept, all of these are welcome, but say clearly which one it is, and back it with real detail rather than claims about what a technology “will” eventually do.
• Do not assume a single technology is always the right answer. Not every problem needs an LLM-based agent; sometimes a simpler, deterministic model is the better fit. A proposal is stronger when it explains why a particular approach matched the problem, not just that it was used.
• Talk about the use of open source technology in your solution. This is a Summit about open source in the networking space. Use this opportunity to influence the industry with open source rather than pitching your company or solution.
• Tell us what people walk away with. A reusable pattern, a pitfall to avoid, or a framework others can adapt gives a reviewer something concrete to picture on stage, and gives the audience a reason to attend.

The Details 

• CFP closes: August 24 (Monday), 23:59 JST / 7:59 PDT 
• Speaker notifications: September 23 
• Schedule announcement: September 28 
• Event dates: December 10-11, Tokyo, alongside Open Source Summit Japan

We are past the point of just talking about autonomous, AI-native networking in theory. We are in the phase of proving it out, and that proof gets built one well-matched, honestly written proposal at a time. If your work sits at the intersection of open source and this next generation of networking, I would like to see it submitted, and hopefully on stage in Tokyo.