Trickster Pictures Collaboratory

Meanwhile on Earth…

The internet is a global conversation. A variety of strange web entities have appeared to enable this – forums, chat rooms, voice over IP, and even video conferencing – Jonathan recently posted his take on this.

The Trickster Pictures team converses in the Collaboratory, a Simple Machines forum. The Category “Business” includes several subcategories – “Latest News”, “Accounting”, “Objectives and Plans”, etc. Under each of the sub categories, members post a topic to start a conversation.

On the topic “Business/Objectives and Plans/To do – Jonathan Kelly”, Jonathan and I discuss his activity for that week.

New topics replace older topics, but all the information remains available and searchable.  As conversations evolve, forums become a rich mine of information about a project’s history, administrative logisitics, technical support, etc. Other members can check in and catch up on everything going on or just what concerns them.

There might be more robust collaboration tools out there, but a forum is easy to configure and familiar to web denizens. Also, Simple Machines forum software is mostly open source – which means it’s free.

Trickster Pictures’ projects trend toward an open source aesthetic. Though open source originally referred to software development it can be applied to processes too.  If we can share how movies are made with a wider community, it might help others to make movies who otherwise wouldn’t be able to, or make them better. I have several blogs that are information distribution points for the process. Though the collaboratory forum is closed to the public, the information generated there is edited and fed out to the blogs. Tours of the Trickster Pictures Collaboratory are available by request.