The 'University of Local Knowledge' (ULK) is a community project that celebrates local skills and knowledge, helping community members to value and spread their knowledge which in turn will aid community stability. The project has the full support of the local community, and is led in part by a steering group of community representatives. Working with artist Suzanne Lacy, KWMC has begun to capture film clips, or 'classes', in which residents share expertise and co-construct knowledge through events and performances.We will build on this foundation by developing technologies and techniques that help us scale up and study community skill and praxis. The University of Local Knowledge will bring together KWMC and the Knowle West community with a team of academics, artists and educators to study the deployment and use of technologies and techniques to collaboratively develop knowledge to enhance our understanding of the relationships between physical and digital community. We will help capture skills in a University-like structure in order to teach and publicise to others within and beyond the community; individual 'classes' will be assembled into programmes of 'study' that will be housed in 'departments' and 'faculties'. We will build systems through which further 'classes' can be added and pedagogic structures can be changed by contributors. We have chosen University as a deliberately contentious metaphor to provoke debate around what constitutes knowledge and why values are placed on different spheres of expertise. These 'classes' will be films/videos of Knowle West residents describing how to do something that they are an expert at; KWMC have captured an initial pool of examples which can be used to populate ULK. The resulting ULK structure will be visualised as a network of classes, departments and faculties. We will implement such structures within an online web service, and allow users both to comment and upload new classes, but also allow experienced members to adapt and 'mash up' the structure of ULK itself in order to better organise or present programmes of study. These web services will also be displayed in physical installations deployed within Bristol. In addition to configuring programmes of study we will convene a series of events including a conference with 'seminars' arranged in local sites, including shops, libraries and homes, with academics and local experts paired in conversation.

REACT: Research & Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technologies. Knowledge Exchange gets lost in translation. Creative Economy demand and Arts and Humanities research culture too routinely fail to understand each other. They can seem to work to different rhythms and values. But they do and they must match, and they must talk, urgently. We will make that happen. REACT will engineer the radical change needed through its unique partnership with a leading Creative Economy broker, Watershed, pioneering a new model of dynamic creative interaction: Sandbox. REACT will match Creative Economy demand with Arts and Humanities excellence, creating sustainable partnerships that will provide significant economic and societal impacts, generating a transformative shift in capacity and HEI cultures at all levels. We will bring two cultures together and lead the necessary process of organisational change. Within four years we will have demonstrated the value of sustained tight integration of the CE sector and AH communities, and secured national and international recognition for our agile mechanism for dynamic knowledge exchange. The REACT Hub is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Watershed Arts Trust, and the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter. It reaches across two dynamic UK regions, and uniquely across three cultural areas and two languages and creative economies. It brings together Arts & Humanities research from fields as diverse as Archaeology, Architecture, Classics, History, English, Welsh, Translation Studies, Performance, Media and Cultural Studies, Design, Music, Computer Science and Digital Technologies. REACT will offer researchers the chance to work with Micro businesses and SMEs, technology partners from either the commercial sector or the partner HEIs and larger scale Cultural Economy and Cultural Industry partners who have an interest in new creative content, and assets to exploit in partnership with academics. REACT will bring together high quality academic research with creative technology partners to developing innovative ways of engaging audiences. Creative economy partners will have the opportunity to develop new delivery platforms and researchers will be able to engage with audiences in new ways. REACT Universities have teamed up Bristol's Watershed Media Centre to adapt their ground breaking innovation development programme, Sandbox, for working with academic researchers. This programme is supported by the University of Exeter's Innovation Fitness Test offering participating Creative Economy partners the chance to strengthen their market potential. Watershed's Sandbox brings together production teams around themed cohorts to make practice based prototypes; production teams follow a common timetable of development and testing, sharing their learning with one another across the cohort. This proven method aggregates ideas, talent and resources harnessing powerful outputs from diverse cross disciplinary inputs. See http://www.theatresandbox.co.uk/2010-evaluation/ for an evaluation of the 20101 Theatre Sandbox scheme.