Distilled from data gathered at Workshop One and community input between Workshops One and Two, the Bamboo program staff asked the over 140 participants who represented 60 institutions and organizations to consider seven initial directions for the Bamboo. One of the results of Workshop Two was a proposed set of eight working groups and recommendations for moving forward with planning activities.

Acting on the recommendations of the community, the Bamboo Leadership Council and program staff have initiated activity in six areas: education and professional development, scholarly networking, tool and content interoperability, building and sustaining partnerships both within institutions and across the Bamboo community, and the services framework that is fundamental to Bamboo. Each of the six areas map to specific working group activities that shall occur before Workshop Three in January 2009. Two additional working groups, Principles for Leadership and Standards & Best Practices, were also identified, but after reviewing their outlined scope it seemed best to postpone these working groups because feedback from the other working will be required to move forward on these topics. For detailed information regarding the working groups, charters, and participation requirements, visit:

http://projectbamboo.org/working-groups-ws2-ws3

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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