In Session

Last weekend I caught Lucky Number Slevin, a slick movie about con artists, gansters, and revenge. While not quite rising to the level of similar films like Pulp Fiction (one of my favorites), it’s worth a full fare admission if you’re in to the dark comedy / violent ganster / highly stylized / pop-culture-reference laden genre. But I’m not here to talk about movies. I’ve been told I’m supposed to talk about ‘Skills Development’.. So here’s the segue:

It turns out that the producers of Slevin used a JotSpot.com wiki to track the production and financing of the film. Wiki’s are collaborative Web sites allowing a group of people to work together on documents. I’ll be talking about wikis and other interesting technology for organizations at my session at the conference, and this is a particularly cool example of them at work.

Independently financed films can acquire a paper trail of contracts and documents that is usally about a foot and a half high when all the revisions and changes are included. Slevin moved the entire process to their wiki. In a press release from JotSpot, Robert Norton with Ascendant Films said, “Our experience with the ‘Lucky Number Slevin’ wiki has truly changed and improved the way we communicate. We plan to expand our use of JotSpot in the production of future films.”

I’ve played a bit with JotSpot, and I like what I see. One problem that I’ve seen with a lot of wiki tools is the difficulty of the editing interface. You have to use special tags and slash commands that don’t come easily to the technophoboic. JotSpot does a pretty good job of hiding that complexity and making it simple for normal people to just start working. I’m on the board of Dallas/IABC, and I’m looking at JotSpot as a way for the board to share documents, calendars, contact lists, and to-dos. Fellow In Session bloggers Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson are using it to collaborate on their new podcasting book. What do you think? How is your organization using wikis, or how might you use one?