Project Bamboo, a cyberinfrastructure planning effort funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, announces the preliminary scope of the planning project. The project launched in April 2008 using the initial ideas outlined in the Bamboo Planning Proposal by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, and through extensive workshop-based and online input from over 100 institutions and organizations over seven months, the community of participants worked to better shape and define the scope of Bamboo.

Based on the work to date, the preliminary focus of Bamboo includes education and professional development, scholarly networking, tool and content interoperability, building and sustaining partnerships both within institutions and across the Bamboo community, and a services framework that is fundamental to Bamboo. Each of these areas map to specific working group activities that shall occur before Workshop Three in January 2009. For detailed information on the scope, visit:

http://projectbamboo.org/preliminary-scope-october-2008

The scope will be further refined over the next several months with the intent to finalize the definition and direction of Bamboo by June 2009.

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Bamboo is community-driven cyberinfrastructure planning project for the arts and humanities led by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley. 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. The fundamental thought behind this approach is that if we can share technologies and content in common ways, we will be able to reduce the overall effort in the long term to create new digital projects, increase the potential for greater innovation as more effort can be placed on new ideas rather than recreating existing solutions, take best advantage of specialized skill sets across the various communities to solve problems, and leverage institutional and community-wide economies of scale to tackle problems and sustain critical projects.

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