The Kaleidoscope academic conference is ITU's flagship academic event. Established in 2008, the conference has been welcomed with great enthusiasm by the ICT research community and has matured into one of the highlights of the ITU's calendar of events. Kaleidoscope's principal aim is to shed light on information and communication technology (ICT) research at an early stage so as to identify associated standardization needs in the interests of promoting the widespread diffusion of research findings through the development of internationally recognized ITU standards. The sixth edition of the conference, ITU Kaleidoscope 2014, took the theme "Living in a converged world - impossible without standards?." It was tackled from a variety of perspectives in line with the multidisciplinary approach mandated by the all-encompassing nature of technological and industrial convergence. This is the first in a series of four special issues to showcase extended versions of selected Kaleidoscope papers, with the series planned as follows: 1. Special issue-1: Towards 5G 2. Special issue-2: e-Health and Standards 3. Special issue-3: Standardization, Education and Innovation 4. Special issue-4: Assessments, Models and Evaluation List of Papers: 1. YOSHITOSHI MURATA AND SHINYA SAITO/"Cyber Parallel Traffic World" Cloud Service in 5G Mobile Networks 2. SUBIN SHEN AND MARCO CARUGI/An Evolutionary Way to Standardize the Internet of Things 3. SINDISO M NLEYA, ANTOINE BAGULA, MARCO ZENNARO AND ERMMANO PIETROSEMOLI/Optimisation of a TV White Space Broadband Market Model for Rural Entrepreneurs 4. FAN BAI, YUWEI SU AND TAKURO SATO/Performance Analysis of RoFSO Links with Diversity Reception for Transmission of OFDM Signals Under Correlated Log-normal Fading Channels 5. BENY NUGRAHA, RAHAMATULLAH KHONDOKER, RONALD MARX, AND KPATCHA BAYAROU/Detecting and Mitigating Repaying Attack in Expressive Internet Architecture (XIA) 6. M. WONG/Challenges of Security Assurance Standardization in ICT