We've all come to have certain expectations of many trade shows.  We expect fanfare and marketing buzzwords. We expect vaulted speeches about the future grounded more in wishful thinking than in reality.

In short, we expect form over substance. 

With Forumville, at TM Forum's Management World Orlando, all of those expectations stand to be dashed. 

Forumville is a concentration of some of the very best in forward-looking, reality-based innovation in the communications space. Under the Forumville umbrella, dubbed the place “where TM Forum comes to life,” visitors can get a first-hand look at what TM Forum members are doing today and how it affects the wider communications picture. 

There are five basic components of Forumville:

TM Forum Knowledge Zone:  This area serves as a central location for TM Forum training, Webcasts, and publications. 

TM Forum Theater:  This is a presentation space for the wide variety of case studies and technical topics produced by TM Forum members.  

Catalyst Technology Showcase:  The Catalysts have long been a particularly bright spot for TM Forum.  These collaborative projects integrate frameworks, processes, interfaces and guidelines that have been developed by TM Forum, and are an outgrowth of the storied NGOSS tradition that has been a major part of the work of TM Forum for many years.  The Catalyst showcase will be an opportunity to see, first-hand, the technology that is often discussed but can be hard to actually track down.

Some Catalyst projects of note include:

• The Harmony Phase 3 Catalyst deals with the capacity and quality of end-to-end Ethernet services.  TM Forum and DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force) work together in this catalyst to demonstrate management architecture that focuses on and promotes interoperability.
• Optimizing the Move to NextGen: Achieving the Business Insight and Flexibility Using PLM, Active Catalog and BPM is a catalyst focusing on process automation.  It is a synthesis of the ideas of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Active Catalog and Business Process Management (BPM), all coming together to foster the management of legacy and next-gen environments in parallel. 
• The Global Information Mobility Catalyst will showcase progress being made towards the goal of uninterrupted content transactions for subscribers.  The key for that are mobility servers that will have to be enormous, reliable, and provide, among other things, content segregation, terminal identity, content security, session priority, service integrity and more. 
• The Enhanced eBonding Catalyst, created to demonstrate and promote the use of the Prosspero-certified OSS/J Trouble Ticket (TT) interface, is designed to facilitate incident management among Service Providers and their partners. 

In addition, visitors to the Catalyst showcase can take a look at the work of the IPSphere Catalyst, which is the result of the recent addition of the IPSphere under the TM Forum umbrella. 

Content Encounter: In Orlando, TM Forum continues the live and interactive Content Encounter that has been such a successful and enlightening component of Management World events since its debut at the 2007 Management World Americas show.  More than 20 companies are participating in Content Encounter Phase 3, focusing on topics from content lifecycle to advertising-based business models and all points in between.

Prosspero Pavilion:  Prosspero is a testament to what happens when theory becomes practice.  At the Prosspero Pavilion, you can see interface standards implementations in practice, and talk to experts who can address the ins and outs of developing, sourcing, and deploying standards-based products.

In short, the five components of Forumville combine to create an environment in which discussion becomes action and theory becomes practice.  It is a destination designed to foster exploration, collaboration, networking and inspiration.