This three-day residency initiated a long-term research partnership between Human Computer Interaction, digital archives, and community development. MSP, a national initative to develop regional productions of The Talking Band’s play, Marcellus Shale, in communities effected by, or concerned with fracking, allowed VTArtWorks to research and build a preliminary prototype of its visionary communication and discovery platform that combines an on-line professional exchange forum for community-based art making with interfacing capacity to access an online archival repository of multimedia artifacts.