Bamboo Planning Project Extended

The University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago are pleased to announce that the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has granted an extension to the Bamboo Planning Project through 30 September 2010.

The planning project was originally scheduled to finish at the end of 2009, but the overwhelming response to the initial call for participation prompted reworking of the project itself and a revision of the timeline. Nearly twice the number of institutions and organizations took part in the planning process as was originally anticipated and over three times as many faculty, researchers, IT leaders, librarians, and content specialists (exceeding 600 individuals) actively participated in the the workshop program. This necessitated major changes to the workshop structure, and one of many impacts was a shift in the workshop schedule. With the extension, the Bamboo Planning Project will be able to complete its planning process.

A characteristic of the planning project has been its series of face-to-face workshops, the last of which was held in Washington D.C. in June 2009. With the extension, Project Bamboo is planning a sixth workshop (Workshop 6) for sometime in late April/early May 2010. Details regarding Workshop 6 and invitations to participate will be announced and sent by the end of February.

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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 or if your institution or organization would like to become a Bamboo member or partner, send email to bamboo_feedback@lists.berkeley.edu