Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

Project Bamboo launched in April 2008 with the first workshop at Berkeley. We held three additional instances of Workshop One (Chicago, Paris, and Princeton), and in the process met with over 360 arts and humanities faculty, computer scientists, librarians, information technologists, and others from over 90 colleges, universities, and private and public organizations who were interested in advancing arts and humanities research through shared technologies.

After Workshop One, participants and others interested in the project analyzed the data collected at the workshops on our Planning Wiki. The themes of scholarly practice derived from the Workshop One data formed the basis for Workshop Two discussions of future directions for Project Bamboo.

Currently, Project Bamboo participants have formed working groups to explore potential directions for the project. We invite you to comment on their work, or help us build Demonstrators - projects that display a concept, serve as a reference model, and reflect and test the results of discussion and analysis.

Bamboo is an international effort that includes liberal arts colleges, community colleges, research universities, national consortia, disciplinary societies, industry and other organizations that are concerned with advancing the humanities through the development of shared digital technologies. If we move toward a shared services model, any faculty member, scholar, or researcher can use and reuse content, resources, and applications no matter where they reside, what their particular field of interest is, or what support may be available to them. Our goal is to better enable and foster academic innovation through sharing and collaboration.