In the last two decade, the Information Technology industry in Nepal has grown thousand fold. In line with the trend the world over, the industry is now maturing into services based industry. At the same time, Nepal's IT education investment in the fast five years has started to show results. In the past few years, Nepali experts and professionals have been able to achieve their own place in the industry. The level of discourse has gone upwards, resulting in benefits to the industry.

Sustaining this a growth requires regular dialogue and interaction between members of the IT community. CAN, understanding the needs of the community, initiated the International IT Conference in 2001, as an integral part of the CAN InfoTech Show. In the past two years, we have had participation in the conference from world over, and papers from all over the world making it to the conference.

Considering the increasing demand and taking in the feedback from the local community, CAN has decided to enlarge the conference and include tutorials and workshops in the conference program. At the same time, CAN is working with international organizations to make the conference a regular event in international IT calendar.

The conference will discuss practical aspects of IT and provide the opportunity to learn from each other's experience. The conference will act as a common platform for sharing success/failure stories related to applications of Information technologies.

In this context, CAN requests papers on the themes identified for the conference. We are interested in practical experiences, research papers and technology papers. We discourage business presentations but encourage business to make technology and research presentation. The aim of the conference is to provide value for the professionals. The three main themes for this year's conference are: Software and Multimedia development, Information Security for e-services, and Networking for future. The conference will be supplemented by one day of pre-conference tutorials and a post conference workshop. Proposals for tutorials and workshops are also requested from experts and professionals.

SANOG I (South Asian Network Operators Group I)
As data networks has grown in the region, this year we are taking the initiative for a South Asian Network Operators Group (SANOG) meeting. This is in line with established practices like NANOG in North America, RIPE NCC Meetings in Europe and APRICOT in Asia. The meeting will provide a regional forum to discuss operational issues and technologies closer home for data operators in the South Asian Region. The themes for this years conference includes operational technologies as an inherent part, to facilitate the organization of SANOG I

THE THREE THEMATIC TRACKS

Multimedia and Software Development
Under this theme, we will invite technical papers, software demonstration and project reports from developers, student and experts. Some sub-topic under this theme may be

• Successful project demonstrations on use of multimedia technologies
• XML / XSL, SOAP applications and innovations
• Software development techniques
• Open Source Software demonstration
• Unicode and local language software
• Streaming audio and video contents

Information Security for E-services
Information security is an increasing concern in all aspects of e-services. We will invite experts to present security paradigm, experiences and research papers. Possible sub topics may be:

• Identifying vulnerabilities
• Models for effective information security
• Securing Banking networks
• Security in e-commerce transaction
• Network Security, firewalls, VPNs
• Cryptography, Public Key Infrastructure

Networking for Future
Networking and Internet are the most important aspect of today's communication and business network. Networking topics may include but are not limited to :

• Routing Protocols and enhancements
• Multi Protocol Label Switching
• Quality of Service implementations
• Backbone network maintenance
• Internet Exchanges establishments
• IPv6 deployment
• Voice Over Internet Protocol technologies.

Possible Topics for Panel Debates

• Open Source Software Development
• Internet Governance
• Information Society and the World Summit on Information Society
• Information Security / Full Disclosure

Possible Topics for Tutorials and Workshops

• IPv6
• Internet Exchanges
• Advanced Topics in DNS
• Multicast
• 802.11b networking
• Internet Routing
• IP Address Managemen