Promoting collaboration, best-practices exchange and operational excellence among its participants is a Quilt priority.  In the last 10 years, the optical network infrastructure deployed by Quilt members has transformed the network capabilities that are available today to research and education (R&E).  The Quilt has helped to facilitate the deployment of this fiber infrastructure through its series of community fiber workshops focused on the procurement and lighting of dark fiber.   Since its original fiber workshops, The Quilt has hosted numerous community workshops on other topics ranging from R&E Network Operations Centers (NOC), NOC Tools, network peering strategies and best practices, and telepresence applications for R&E.  

Summary of past Quilt workshops

Inaugural Quilt Regional Optical Networking Workshop
June 21-23, 2004  Broomfield, CO
Workshop Summary:  This workshop focused on providing detailed information on building, managing and connecting to Metro or Regional Optical Networking infrastructure.  The Workshop concentrated on three main areas: strategy and procurement, fiber acquisition, and technical implementation.

2nd Quilt Optical Networking Workshop
November 30 - December 2, 2004  Research Triangle Park, NC
Workshop Summary:  This workshop focused on issues associated with building and managing Metro or Regional Optical Networking (RON) infrastructure.  A true example topology was used as a case study, including presentations by vendors on how their equipment would be deployed over this topology.  Presentations covered fiber types, optical testing, optical network equipment, RON's and backbones.

3rd Quilt Optical Networking Workshop
May 31 - June 3, 2005 Newport, RI
Workshop Summary:  This workshop focused on the activities and issues associated with optical networking testing, test equipment and testing services, optical network management tools, current trends in metro and regional networks and connecting to other optical networks.

4th Quilt Optical Networking Workshop
January 19-20, 2006   Ft. Lauderdale, FL
Workshop Summary:  This workshop was dedicated to discussing key issues and developing technical, operational and economic guidelines for Regional Optical Network inter-connects.

5th Quilt Optical Networking Workshop
October 12-13, 2006, St. Louis, MO
Workshop Summary:  A continuation in The Quilt’s workshop series with a focus on Regional Optical Networking (RON) operational issues, topics included service delivery options available for RON’s to provide connectivity to campuses, summary of common RON business models, GigaPoP reliability and best-practices sharing for capacity planning at Layers 1 and 2.

Quilt Network Peering Workshop
October 11-12, 2006 St. Louis MO
Workshop Summary:  Covered the different facets of peering and provides updates on the current state of national R&E peering efforts.

Quilt Network Operations Center Workshop
October 3-4, 2007 Austin, TX
Workshop Summary:  Day-to-day operations of a Network Operations Center (NOC) and its staff such as NOC models, facility plans, system tools and staff scheduling.

Quilt Regional Optical Network Business Model Workshop
March 25, 2008 Miami, FL
Workshop Summary:  An interactive session with an emphasis on Regional Optical Network (RON) and State Network Services and Pricing Models, drawing on the joint effort of The Quilt and South Carolina community network MIDnet to collect RON case studies as well as the on-going financial data collection activities happening within the StateNets-Quilt Financial Focus Group.

Quilt Network Operations Center Tools Workshop
September 10, 2008 via Videoconference
Workshop Summary:  A follow-on meeting to the discussions that took place at The Quilt's first Network Operations Center workshop in October 2007, with a focus on Network Operations Center (NOC) tools.  This workshop was designed by a group of NOC managers and resources from across the community with responsibilities for the choice, deployment and integration of software applications that support the day-to-day operations of a R&E NOC.

Quilt TelePresence Workshop
September 14-15, 2009  Kansas City, MO
Workshop Summary:  The result of very close collaboration between several partners including The Quilt, Internet2, NLR and Cisco, this workshop sought to address the interests and questions of the research and education community with regard to TelePresence and to share how early TelePresence adopters in R&E such as the University of Missouri Kansas City and Harvard are applying Telepresence and their lessons learned along the way.  The program included actionable advice about how to get a TelePresence endpoint set up, the latest TelePresence roadmap as well as how regional networks, academia and research groups can leverage TelePresence to suit their particular needs and situations.

Quilt Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) Workshop
July 22-23, 2010  La Jolla, CA
Workshop Summary:  Supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, The Quilt hosted this workshop to educate and engage campus and regional network representatives that have not yet participated in GENI activities but will be key stakeholders in the scaling of GENI in the next year.
The workshop was held in conjunction with the GENI Engineering Conference #8 (GEC8).

Quilt TelePresence Workshop Take II
December 1, 2010 via Videoconference
Workshop Summary:  This workshop conducted over TelePresence covered new developments in TelePresence for R&E, actionable information on connecting an institution or organization to the Unified R&E TelePresence Service and case studies from TelePresence innovators in K-12, post-secondary and university administration.