Every few years, Hawaii serves as the setting to advance the frontier of Internet technologies so fundamental to research, education, economic development and social development. What better place to bring the brightest minds together than in paradise?

In January, more than 300 of the world’s leading next generation Internet engineers and architects gathered for a series of international technical meetings at Techs in Paradise (TIP2008), at the University of Hawaii Manoa. It was a rare opportunity to bring together the North American and Asia-Pacific advanced networking communities for a week of meetings, workshops, collaboration, conversation and fellowship.

The event bridged East with West — exemplifying how Hawaii serves as the perfect global nexus for future innovations.

The state continues to work towards positioning Hawaii as a competitive center for technology. In her State of the State address in 2007, Governor Linda Lingle said, "I have tried to outline for you today a shared vision of what our Hawai'i of the future can look like. It is a Hawai'i in which our location in the Pacific and our cultural diversity will be significant advantages as we compete with the rest of the world. It is a Hawai'i in which prosperity will be created more through the power of innovation and new ideas..."

University of Hawaii Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer David Lassner agrees with this vision. As the conference host, he says, "Hawaii provides the perfect venue to bring together the advanced networking communities from both sides of the Pacific. TIP2008 provides Hawaii’s network engineers a rare glimpse into the future of networking."

TIP2008, the third in a series of networking meetings that began in 2001, drew together the Internet2 technical community from North America with the Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN), a multilateral regional counterpart to Internet2, to The East-West Center at UH. Numerous meetings between other organizations took advantage of this confluence of expertise in Hawaii, including the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation, the Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) and the Hawaii Intranet Consortium.

According to Lassner, TIP offers the university a unique opportunity to leverage Hawaii’s location in the middle of the Pacific — both geographically and culturally.

"Hawaii plays this sort of social and geographic ‘lubrication’ role in that we generally understand many of the Asian cultures better than other places in the U.S.," he explains.

Lassner says that TIP not only brings together the biggest and brightest new ideas for advanced networking, but it also helps begin communication between organizations and individuals who might never otherwise connect on a face-to-face level.

"TIP is the first time some of these people have a chance to get together and listen to what’s going on in Japan, China , Korea and some of the other countries that also have advanced networks," says Lassner. "It’s keeping in touch with the general approaches so that when these people want to work together further, they’ve had a personal experience of working with one another. Otherwise, it’s pretty hard to work with people from other countries and of other cultures if you haven’t had a chance to meet at least once."