News

The Bamboo Planning Project, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together hundreds of faculty, technologists, and librarians from a wide range of institutions and disciplines to determine how technology can support research, scholarship and teaching challenges in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. The planning workshops identified three elements that are essential to a sustainable shared humanities technology infrastructure:

• shared understanding of commonalities and practices across disciplines and fields,
• shared technology services, and
• an array of organizational and social models that encourage local and community-wide exploration, adoption and investment.

The participants recognized that a consortium of partner and member institutions would be essential to create and sustain the work of Project Bamboo. We are pleased to announce that an initial broad partnership has been formed with the Australian National University; Indiana University; Northwestern University; Tufts University; University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; University of Maryland; University of Oxford; and University of Wisconsin - Madison, to advance the technology development work of Project Bamboo.

This group is ready to make significant commitments of institutional resources and is seeking additional support toward the development of shared content and corpora-oriented software services, components and tools. These two efforts would be built upon a foundation of two additional shared infrastructure projects that will support the work of technologists who partner with faculty and scholars to create tools and applications. The first infrastructure project involves the development of a set of scholarly web services on a shared services platform; the second concentrates on the adoption and dissemination of interoperability standards and services.

Additional details regarding the technology program will be available in autumn. For more information about Project Bamboo and the Project Bamboo Consortium, please contact us via email at bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu or visit http://projectbamboo.org

As the final workshop of the planning project drew to a close in Providence, RI, on June 18, 2010, the participants started work defining and creating the Project Bamboo Consortium to further grow, sustain and evolve the program and vision developed over the last two years.

Within weeks, Project Bamboo will be launching three volunteer working groups to identify key aspects of the consortium and define how it moves forward. The Membership & Consortium working group will create the participation model for Project Bamboo and propose an operational and governance structure. The second working group, Outreach & Communications, will turn its attention toward creating a communications strategy that includes new outreach materials and redeveloping the projectbamboo.org website. The final group, Bamboo Labs, will concentrate its efforts toward community engagement, and more specifically around how groups can take part in adoption projects that promote the use of Project Bamboo services and connect ideas and needs across institutional and organizational boundaries.

Like the working groups themselves, leadership will come from volunteers from within the community and as such, we would like to thank the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, University of Alabama, University of Louisiana - Lafayette, University of Wisconsin - Madison, City University of New York, and the University of Chicago for volunteering to shape and/or lead working group efforts. In addition, we would like to also thank all of the people who took part in Workshop Six for contributing their time and ideas toward launching the Project Bamboo consortium.

Institutions and organizations will be invited participate in these working groups. More information, including how to participate, will be coming over the next several weeks. For more information about Project Bamboo and the Project Bamboo Consortium, please contact us via email at bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu or visit http://projectbamboo.org

Workshop Six: Registration Period Now Open
12 May 2010

Project Bamboo's Workshop Six will be held in Providence, Rhode Island, on June 17-18, 2010. The two-day workshop will begin Thursday morning at 9am and run through 3pm on Friday. The preliminary agenda is available on the Project Bamboo website: http://www.projectbamboo.org/workshop-six.

As we process registrations and finalize workshop details, we will update the workshop page posted at http://projectbamboo.org/workshop-six. If you have any questions regarding registration, feel free to contact us at bamboo_event_coordination@lists.berkeley.edu

Project Bamboo is community-driven cyberinfrastructure planning project for the arts and humanities led by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. Project Bamboo strives to create a consortium of universities, colleges, libraries, organizations, and industry partners committed to supporting research, teaching and learning in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences. The approach central to the planning project is one rooted in creating, reusing, remixing, and sharing technology services across project, institutional, organizational, regional, and national boundaries.

For more information on Bamboo, send email to bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu.