Attention Members: A new TM Forum Intellectual Property Rights policy is now available for your review.

The TM Forum aims to create a vibrant and dynamic global community of professionals who can readily share information and reach collaborative agreements to help drive the industry, create long-term, sustainable high performance businesses through a comprehensive framework of best practices, technology roadmaps, specifications, certification, training and support to help the industry we serve drive down operational costs; drive up their customer’s experience and allow rapid deployment of new and exciting services.

The TM Forum Collaboration Program development is guided by the TM Forum’s Strategic Plan created with input from a wide range of advisors and approved annually by the Board of Directors. This document represents a collective vision of the likely trends and developments in the communications industry over the next two to three years, and defines the key initiatives that must be driven by the Forum’s Collaboration Program in response to those trends and developments.

TM Forum’s obligation to its members is to provide professionally run, simple and effective collaboration processes within the umbrella of transparent, positive and legally-correct behavior on the part of all participants in order to produce useful, pragmatic and timely solutions to key industry problems.

Where appropriate, TM Forum resources are also used to provide project management, marketing, technical expertise and implementation support such as training and certification.

In order to achieve success, all collaborative work must Focus on Adoption, ensuring that the end users needs are clearly identified, and ensuring that the valuable work produced is easy to consume and implement.

All collaboration interest groups, projects and activities are supported by the Forum’s collaboration environment and communication channels which include:

• A best in class, community-based collaboration environment which is available to all Forum members, offering a web 2.0 collaboration platform with extensive transparent collaborative tooling, project support tools and source code management capabilities. Usage of the collaboration environment is governed by a set of terms and conditions which are set out here.  
• A safe, well established intellectual property and anti-trust regime, aligned with existing and emerging regulations around the world, which serves to protect the interests of the contributors while maximising uptake of the output material
• Promotional capability to registered individuals in member companies  
• Guidance and advice on how to best utilise other Forum work to expedite results
• Assistance with liaison agreements with other industry bodies in order to gain access to existing work or drive uptake of our work

A detailed process to support the production of collaborative work has been defined and documented here. However, some highlights and clarifications are offered below as additional supporting information for some important areas.

• Interest Groups
• Project Charters
• Project Charter Approval
• Executing the Project
• Explanation of the Approval levels for Deliverables
• Closing a project
• Successful Projects
• Allocation of TM Forum Resources to the Project
• Links with Pre-Existing Work