"Soft" ways to contribute to the research community in a new and growing field I am doing my PhD research in a new multidisciplinary field within Computer Science. It is new in the sense that there are still no tools/implementations publicly available and several workshops co-located with different conferences. Many papers targeting this new area, have been published in different conferences and journals.  As a PhD student and besides the scientific contributions, I would wonder what other soft things I can do for the field?  

So far I have developed a tool for one of the main models in the field. I am documenting it to make it public. I thought about maintaining a bibliography. but not sure how beneficial it is.
You should remember that as a Ph.D student, the instruments at your disposal are limited. Having said that, maintaining a bibliography is a useful way to collect all relevant information in one place, especially given the multidisciplinary nature of the area. If you do this though, be careful to


make sure things are always kept up-to-date. There's nothing more annoying than a half-baked reference page
Be very liberal in what you include in the bibliography. It shouldn't be perceived that you're being a gatekeeper for the area. 
If possible, provide some structure to the bibliography: sections, maybe some annotation, etc. Depending on how web-savvy you are, you might be able to create a form for people to enter information in themselves. 


The primary benefit for you will be access to the entire body of work in the area, and some credit for maintaining the page. There will undoubtedly be name recognition benefits if you are perceived not only as the librarian, but as an expert on the topic.