July 31, 2008

On April 1, 2008, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded Project Bamboo to facilitate an 18-month planning and community design program that is centered around the question: how can we enhance arts and humanities research through shared technology services? The community design program is modeled around a series of conversations that include five structured workshops, the creation of demonstrator software and pilot applications, the publication of three core documents, and collaborative institutional engagement. The vision is that these efforts will enable communities with interest in arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences to map out the scholarly practices and common technology challenges across and among disciplines to discover where a coordinated, cross-disciplinary development effort can best foster increased academic innovation.

Input into the Bamboo process has been sought from individuals who represent a diverse range of institutions (liberal arts colleges to research universities), organizations (consortia and agencies to content and technology providers), professional backgrounds (faculty, librarians, researchers, IT leaders, and technical specialists), and geographic regions (including, but not limited to Australia, Europe, and North America).

Workshop One

Project Bamboo held four instances of Workshop One in a 13-week window (April 28, 2008 through July 16, 2008) entitled: "Understanding Arts and Humanities Scholarship." The workshops were held in Berkeley, CA; Chicago, IL; Paris, France; and Princeton, NJ. The goals of this workshop series were to:

• introduce Project Bamboo and the community design process;
• meet with colleagues who have a common interest in shared technology services in the arts and humanities;
• discuss the future of disciplines and the impact of digital technologies;
• develop a high-level list of scholarly practices related to arts and humanities;
• provide input on the future of Project Bamboo; and
• refine the next steps toward Workshop 2, "Exploring Scholarly Practices."

Workshop One was originally planned to be held three times and expected to engage, at most, 200 participants from 50 institutions. However, the response to Project Bamboo was much greater than anticipated such that we added an additional instance of Workshop One. The workshop was graciously hosted by the Office of Information Technology and the Center for Arts & Cultural Policy Studies at Princeton University. Even with this additional workshop, we could not accommodate all the interested institutions. Because of this, we removed the requirement of institutional participation in Workshop One in order to proceed to Workshop Two.

Our current workshop registration list shows more than 325 participants and reflects more than 90 institutions, organizations, agencies, etc. We have had international participation from Europe, North America and Australia as well as interest from Asia and South America. We know of at least ten additional institutions that have interest in participating in Project Bamboo.

Data collection for all instances of Workshop One occurred through facilitated discussions among the participants over a period of 2 1/2 days. Each workshop was broken into a number of exercises (between six and seven) where participants worked in small groups to tackle the problems posed by each activity. The notes from each small and large group sessions were captured by an assigned table scribe; in some cases that was the facilitator and in others, the note taker was a separate individual. These notes along with other data related to the project have been placed for public input and review on the planning wiki.

The wiki is a major forum for the community to engage in the planning process. After Workshop One, we asked the community to read the data gathered at the workshops, identify themes of scholarly practices, build collections of themes into larger sets of scholarly practice, map the future directions of Project Bamboo, and propose organizational and consortial models for Project Bamboo. The wiki automatically grants editing rights to anyone as long as they register themselves as user. Workshop participants have already received an account as part of the workshop registration process. The wiki can be accessed here. For technical help with the wiki, contact bamboo_feedback@list.berkeley.edu.

Future Workshops

The addition of a fourth instance of Workshop One required the project to alter our workshop schedule. Workshop Two took place the week of October 13, 2008 in San Francisco. Workshop Three occured during the week of January 12, 2009 in Tucson, Arizona.

For the convenience of participants and to simplify program planning, program staff have elected to alter the original plan of hosting events on the Berkeley and Chicago campuses and to choose workshop venues that are near major transportation hubs, possess commercial conference facilities that can handle upwards of 150-200 people, and have affordable accommodations within walking distance to the workshop venue.