Home ›

News

Draft 0.6 of the Bamboo Implementation Proposal Now Available

03 August 2009
Version 0.6 draft of the Bamboo Implementation Proposal has been released and will be available for community comment and feedback through 19 August 2009. This draft incorporates feedback from Workshop 5 as well as a number of post-workshop comments and contributions by members of the Bamboo Community. Although this draft is far from complete, section 4, "Areas of Work," and section 5, "Community & Governance" have been reworked to provide more focus to what Bamboo aims to accomplish, how development and contributions will be managed, and what will be required of institutions become an implementation member or partner.
 
Between Workshop 4 (April 2009) and Workshop 5 (June 2009), the proposal drafting process transitioned from creating an overarching program document, which provides a 7-10 year view of what Bamboo should accomplish, to drafting of a one-year implementation proposal. This focused and narrowed effort has been significantly influenced by comments from the community on the project wiki, via conference calls, and through in-person conversations. In parallel, representatives from over 30 institutions spoke with the project directors to discuss the direction of the proposal and the resources needed for implementation.
 
Individuals from the Bamboo community gathered in Washington, DC on 17-19 June to participate in Workshop 5 of the Bamboo Planning process. The final workshop in the series focused on three major activities: the discussion and refinement of the areas of work as expressed in the draft 0.5 implementation proposal (especially the value proposition); a ratification vote on those areas of work; and the evaluation of a community governance model. At that time participants volunteered to contribute two types of material to the implementation proposal: scenarios of Bamboo's value/potential impact for various communities serving humanities research and teaching, and stories of how the Bamboo Planning Project has impacted work-to-date. Over 20 value and impact statements have been collected from the community, many of which have been incorporated into this draft.
 
To view and submit comments on this draft of the proposal, please visit: 
 
 
If you are not currently registered on the wiki and would like to take part in the discussion and comment on the draft, sign up by clicking on the "Sign Up" link in the upper right corner of the wiki page.
 
Comments on draft 0.6 will be accepted through 19 August 2009.
 
---
 
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 or if your institution or organization would like to become a Bamboo member or partner, send email to bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu

Bamboo focuses effort and releases discussion draft

07 May 2009

The hard work, discussion and debate carried out by those who attended the Bamboo Planning Workshop 4 on 16-18 April 2009 provided considerable material and guidance to advance the planning effort of Bamboo. Since the end of the workshop that was hosted by Brown University, the Bamboo program staff at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago have been hard at work consolidating ideas and recommendations from workshop participants into a scope of work for the first implementation phase of Bamboo.

The over 80 participants who represented nearly 40 colleges, universities and  organizations from Australia, Italy, Germany, UK, Canada, and the United States gathered in Providence, RI, to review and discuss the workshop draft of the Bamboo Program Document. Discussion centered on the long-term (7-10 year) vision for the project with a goal of narrowing the focus of effort toward an initial two-year phase of work that proposes to start in 2010.

Eleven different areas were identified as possible directions for Bamboo over the next decade and through both discussion and two rounds of polling and voting, participants prioritized the major areas Bamboo should undertake early in implementation. Immediately after the workshop, the program staff held a retreat in Chicago on 20-21 April to coalesce the workshop outcomes into a subset of activities that could potentially launch Bamboo. This work was shared with the Bamboo Leadership Council on 1 May. The council members reviewed the material and recommended further refinement. Based on the output of Workshop 4 and the Leadership Council's feedback, first discussion draft of the Bamboo Implementation Proposal has been posted on the Bamboo Planning Wiki:

https://wiki.projectbamboo.org/display/BPUB/BIP+Discussion+Draft+v0.2

The discussion draft is largely an outline for the proposal with considerable detail expressed around section four, "Major Areas of Work." For the first phase of implementation, the proposal concentrates on three areas:

  1. Scholarly Networking to enable "people to discover resources, build relationships, and connect with others across the Bamboo community and beyond;"
  2. Bamboo Atlas to provide "avenues for scholars in the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences to express their practice, participate in its analysis from methodological and technological perspectives, and locate community-vetted services, tools, and digital content repositories applicable to areas and practices of pedagogical and research interest;" and
  3. Bamboo Services Platform to "deliver the technical infrastructure that permits humanities projects to transition from project-specific applications to longer-lived, more broadly supported, more efficiently operated, and more widely useful services, setting the stage for a future in which many scholars, content stewards, and technologists can easily discover, combine, re-mix, and share content and technology to create new forms of digital research and teaching."

In addition, Bamboo will continue to develop and grow the global Bamboo Community of scholars, researchers, technologists, librarians, content experts and others who are interested in the future of arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences research, teaching, and learning.

The purpose of this discussion draft is to share Bamboo planning progress to date, assist with discussions among institutions wishing to participate in Bamboo, and solicit input from the community regarding the development and ongoing revision of the Bamboo Implementation Proposal. Comment is open to the broader Bamboo Community which are those individuals who have signed up on the Bamboo Planning Project Wiki:

http://wiki.projectbamboo.org

If you are not currently registered on the wiki and would like to take part in the discussion and comment on the draft, sign up by clicking on the "Sign Up" link in the upper right corner of the wiki page.

---

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

Workshop Four Travel and Lodging

03 March 2009

The web page for Project Bamboo's Workshop Four has been updated with details about travel to and around Providence, Rhode Island, as well as information about the room block at our conference hotel, the Providence Biltmore: http://www.projectbamboo.org/workshop-four

Thanks to Elli Mylonas of Brown University for putting this together.

---

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.
<!--break-->