The planning process is built around a series of five workshops where institutional and organizational teams enter into a dialogue around the issues, trends, opportunities, and challenges that a shared model poses to the community. The workshops build upon each other and toward determining a roadmap of goals to pursue, tools to provide, platforms on which to run, and architecture to use.

Over time, workshop participation and workload requirements will incrementally increase. At the end of each workshop, inter-institutional teams will be formed to complete specific assignments based on the workshop training and discussion. These assignments will used in the written reports as well as for shaping the exercises and discussions of subsequent workshops.

Between workshops, pilot projects will be designed and implemented to demonstrate potential uses of services-facilitated technology in the arts and humanities. These may be demonstration or proof of concept projects that explore ideas with individual partners or small multi-institutional groups, they may be existing ongoing projects that are examined from our Bamboo perspective, or they may be entirely new projects. In any case, these pilot projects will be used to demonstrate what's possible and act as a springboard for continued discussion and roadmap development.

Ongoing commitment for participants is based on a willingness to continue with the process. For example, if after the third workshop and institution feels it has contributed all it can, it may leave the planning process and continue to follow Bamboo's progress and still be part of the broader Bamboo community even though it is not actively engaged in the planning process.

Part of the ongoing commitment requires participation in the community design process. Through early 2009, this includes:

• Read the questions  asked at the workshops
• Analyze the notes  related to those questions
• Identify themes  of scholarly practice based off the analysis
• Build collections  of themes that represent a set of scholarly practice
• Map the future direction  of Project Bamboo
• Propose consortial or organizational models  for Project Bamboo