Caveat Lector

Chad Kainz, UChicago, and David Greenbaum, UC-Berkeley. Both responsible for shared-data and IT support services at their respective institutions. Rich Meyer, logistics. Sara Ware, event coordinator.

84 institutions globally participating in Project Bamboo; “exceeded our wildest expectations”

Thanks to Mellon Foundation for funding “how we can make it easier for institutions to support the work that goes on in the arts and humanities;” the way to do that is through conversations.

Ida Noyes Hall, once the women’s student union. Now, career placement services, School of Business stuff.

Bamboo Project is thinking about the world we live in, the projects we do, and realizing that it takes a lot of different people to make everything work: IT, faculty, researchers, librarians, IS, etc. Problem of code that no longer runs; takes a lot of effort to sustain over the long term. Do we know what is possible? How have we been affected by e.g. Google (Books, Scholar, Maps)? Connecting our resources and knowhow with commercial services has enormous potential; what are the ramifications?

Central question: How do we work together to make it easier to foster innovation in the arts and humanities, through development of shared technology services?

(discursus on bamboo and how it fits as the project name: organic, flexible, sustainable, etc.)

“Arts and humanities:” intentionally broad scope; performing arts, history, philosophy, humanistic social sciences, etc. “advance research:” pushing for transformation as well as increasing efficiency and effectiveness. “shared tech services:” moving away from isolated projects and silos to shareable, reusable, mashuppable services; everything from massive shared-data stuff to the “wild west” of Web 2.0.

Cyberinfrastructure: three interlocking Borromean rings (Dan Atkins). Behavior/organizational science, users/communities of practice, IT. In the arts and humanities: common understanding of practices, directions, commonalities among humanists, librarians, technologists; shared tech services; models of organizations, partnerships, and social cooperation among the stakeholders.

Step one: workshops (this is the second of four). Step two: “Exploring Scholarly Practices” Sept 2008 at UC-Berkeley (roundup of workshop results). Step 3: identifying services.

Also building demonstrators and pilot projects: to explore commonalities, demo services, experiment with new app models, test ideas, promote collaboration among stakeholders.

Documents: workshop reports, finally a proposal for implementation.

Workshop structured to engage at institutional level. Each team from an institution has to have at least one A&H faculty member and one IT/library person; rest of team flexible. Organizational and industry participants are those with sincere interest in Bamboo, desire to promote academic innovation, desire to create sustainable models; they are here to explore relationships with funders, museums, library consortia, companies (e.g. Sun).

A lot of conversations have already happened, but usually in a siloed context; what Bamboo is doing is bringing those conversations together.

Success conditions: Understand A&H practices enough to design tech services. Create a roadmap for shared tech services. Identify priorities. Find organizational, staffing, and partnership models that enable these services to be sustainable and ongoing (e.g. “digital humanities center,” embedded tech inside departments, an extension of the library). Build a core set of institutional and organizational collaborators who will work toward the goals of Bamboo (”last folks standing,” can’t run an implementation project with 84 institutions!). Make opportunities for new collaboration.

(rundown of project leadership. Wireless is getting stressed, it looks like; I am closing unnecessary windows and services.)

Principles of community design to be used in Project Bamboo: “Listening tour” (Cohen, GMU), guided by framework of goals and a commitment to action; flexible over time based on what they hear. Create “upward spiral of conversation” (Broughton, UC-Berkeley). Translation between communities of practice, driving toward a common language. On tables is a page for adding terms to their glossary. Search for commonalities, but respect context and uniqueness. Define responsibilities of participant institutions, and implementation priorities. Create a “we,” not a “you/us.”

Q: what is to be implemented at the end of this process? A: whatever comes out of the workshop as opportunities to make tech more shareable, or enabling community collaboration, or helping people find opportunities to share. Could be lots of things. Maybe a web-services framework to expose services. We don’t know yet what the answer is! Depends on what we hear. How do we capture “what has been done” and help people know where and how to start? What standards and specs are relevant, important, worth supporting and sharing (APIs, discipline-specific standards and practices, etc)? Avoid reinventing wheels.

(There’s a dictionary-exchange standard kicking around somewhere! I didn’t know that. Anybody else?)

Q: Will Project Bamboo engage standards orgs, e.g. TEI-C? A: Maybe at the roadmapping stage, where we ask who’s been tackling these problems already… problem is that project plan changed after Berkeley workshop and will continue to change. They have already been in contact with someone at TEI-C.

Q: As workshops continue, will the desired participants shift? A: We have to get to a tech roadmap, so we frontloaded with faculty now so that we can grab the techies later. Also, easier to grab faculty now, when semesters are ending. Narrow participation list, but not exclude participants. They are thinking about how to manage virtual collaboration for this project, so that physical participation isn’t essential. Want to ensure that this remains an A&H-driven project throughout.

Q: Why not imagine a way for all 84, or 800, institutions to implement? A: We’re hoping to find a collaborative model allowing large numbers to engage. But at some point, we have to differentiate roles among partners; some will carry heavier loads and commit more resources.

Q: Six deliverables identified, process and timeframe set. But workshops change iteratively! How does that affect analysis at the end? A: Right now, what’s changing is the workshop series, more of a fine-tuning thing. After Berkeley, less emphasis on finding commonalities, more on respecting and learning about uniqueness. Sometimes unique doesn’t turn out to be, but you don’t know until you ask and explore. Start going through the data after the Paris workshop.

Q: What about audiences? Self-selected group so far. What other publics are involved? Broader public, public intellectuals, other communities who wouldn’t come to Project Bamboo. A: Grant talks about research, but definition of “research” quite broad. Several of us very interested in public side of teaching and engaging; it has been brought up often. If we do this right, we’re making models that help public engagement as well.