ICT Innovations has published Awesome Asterisk, a curated list of open source tools, libraries and resources for the Asterisk telephony platform. It is live on GitHub under a CC0 public domain licence, carries 40 projects across 13 sections, and passes awesome-lint, the official validator for the format.

Why a list at all

Asterisk gives you call control and a media path. Almost everything else a working phone system needs sits outside it. The web interface, the dialler, the call recording, the monitoring, the fail2ban rules, the SIP proxy sitting in front of it, all of that comes from other projects.

Those projects are spread across a decade of forum threads, blog posts that have since gone offline, and repositories nobody has touched since 2019. Working out which ones are still alive takes an afternoon you would rather spend building something. That is the afternoon this list is meant to save you.

What is on it

The 13 sections are official resources, distributions and web interfaces, ARI, AMI and AGI libraries, streaming call audio, voice AI, SIP proxies and session border control, media and RTP, testing and troubleshooting, security, contact centre and dialling, endpoints, and learning material.

Every entry was opened and read before it went in. The check was deliberately boring: is there a licence, and has anyone committed to it lately. Anything that failed was left out rather than listed with a warning next to it. Entries that go stale later will be removed instead of kept for the sake of completeness, because a directory that walks you into abandoned software costs you more time than it saves.

The gap it fills

This part is genuinely odd. The awesome.re directory, the umbrella index that points at all the other curated lists, carries 622 of them. Not one covers telephony, VoIP, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, SIP or WebRTC. An industry running a large share of the world's call centres and business phone systems had no entry point there at all.

Four entries are ours, and we say so

Four of the 40 projects are software ICT Innovations maintains: asterisk-ami-node, asterisk-audiosocket, asterisk-ai-voice-agent and tvbench. Rather than mixing them in quietly, the list names all four in a Disclosure section near the bottom and invites anyone to argue with them in an issue.

"A curated list stops being useful the moment people suspect it's an advert," said Tahir Almas, founder of ICT Innovations. "So we put our own four in writing at the bottom of the page and said, challenge them. If one doesn't deserve its spot, open an issue and we'll pull it. The other 36 had to earn their place the same way."

The company has committed to keeping it current rather than publishing it and walking away. Links get rechecked, dead projects come out, new ones go in through issues and pull requests, and there is a contributing guide setting out what qualifies.

FAQ

What licence is the list under?

CC0 1.0, which puts it in the public domain. You can copy it, fork it, or lift entries out of it for your own documentation without asking permission or crediting anyone.

How do I add a project?

Open a pull request against the repository. The contributing guide covers what qualifies. In short, the project needs a licence, a public repository, recent activity, and a one-line description of what it actually does rather than what it aspires to do.

Does it cover FreeSWITCH as well?

No. Only Asterisk-based software is listed, and that rule was applied to our own projects too. ICTFax, ICTPBX and ICTCore are FreeSWITCH-based, so none of them appear on it.

What does awesome-lint check?

Structure, mainly. It validates the table of contents against the real headings, the licence file, the required GitHub topics, entry formatting and link style. Passing it matters because the wider awesome directory requires it.

Where can I see the other open source work?

The full set of ICT Innovations open source projects is listed at ictinnovations.com/projects, covering fax, PBX, contact centre and voice AI software.

Awesome Asterisk is at github.com/ictinnovations/awesome-asterisk.