Living Open Source

Celtx aims to be a fully integrated solution for media pre-production and collaboration. If you have an idea for a story, movie or play then Celtx is designed to help you develop ideas of plot, scene and characters. You can use it to storyboard a project and collaborate with others too. It can help you organise a project, gathering images, sounds, clips into one place to work into an idea. There is also the Celtx Project Central site which allows Celtx users to access an on-line community where collaboration and sharing of work is possible.

I really like this concept and the software seems pretty cool, but you may wonder what it has to offer churches given that this is a series on Open Source software for church use! Well, clearly if you are into producing your own drama scripts or audio-visuals then this may help bring some organisation to your work. You might even find this tool works well for working on services and even sermons! It would also be interesting to explore the collaboration aspects. There have been a number of examples of collaborative, open source films and other media productions recently. Celtx’s own Project Central aims to encourage such work. It would be great to see a bunch of Christians put their heads together to produce some amazing media projects.

In fact I did find a couple (and only a couple!) of embryonic Christian projects on Project Central that seem to head in that kind of direction. For example, I found this project that is for producing a series of DVDs introducing the Christian faith for young people. It doesn’t look like the project came to anything as it is unfinished, but is a good example of the kind of thing that Celtx is intended for.

So, is anybody up for working on an Open Source Alpha or a series of alternative parable scripts or some new life changing youth teaching materials?