FAILFaire

Talking about success is easy, but talking about fail is more fun (and definitely more cathartic).  On Monday, July 26th, MobileActive.org hosted a FailFaire in Washington, D.C. together with the World Bank Institute. The event brought together developers and practitioners in the ICT4D field in an open and relaxed environment to talk about those times when projects didn’t go according to plan.

Presenters gave quick, Ignite-style talks about projects that had unintended outcomes, failed to meet the needs of the local community, or never got off the ground in the first place. FailFaires are interactive, take a lighter approach (because failure is hard), and allow presenters to share what they’ve learned in a supportive, engaged environment.

The winner of ‘best presentation’ as voted by the attendees, was the World Bank’s very own Michael Trucano, who presented “Worst Practice in ICT Use in Education” a guide on how to fail in ICT4E. Highlights from the rapid-fire, 50 slide (yes, 50 slides!) presentation included: “ Dump hardware in schools, wait for magic to happen,” “Think about educational content only after you have rolled out your hardware,” and “Make a big bet on an unproven technology (especially one based on a closed/proprietary standard) or single vendor/ don’t plan for how to avoid ‘lock-in’.” Attendees tweeted along with the action:

Other presentations focused on issues such as not adequately anticipating gender inequality in local communities and failing to build sustainable models with local buy-in – issues well familiar to those who work in international development.

InfoDev’s Tim Kelly gave a presentation on the difficulty of global scaling called “Global Capacity Building Initiative for ICT Regulators” – the project never got off the ground. He started by pointing out that there is often the temptation to “go global” in our field, but that the project would have been better if it had started smaller. Wayan Vota presented on his personal experience developing an online forum that missed its target audience – he found, for example, that most of the people he was trying to engage (local decision makers) were not involved in the online community.

The D.C. FailFaire also featured “miniFails” – short, five-minute looks at one small fail within a larger (and often successful) project. Rachel LaBruyere from the Fair Immigration Reform Coalition presented a translation failure – a poor translation of the word “unsubscribe” into Spanish that caused over 2,000 people to unsubscribe from FIRM’s mobile list.  The word (“alto”) the organization choose for “stop” (i.e., “unsubscribe”) actually had a passionate connotation. So some people texted ALTO as a sign of solidarity, not because they wanted to be off the list.

So, why does an event like FailFaire matter? It creates an open environment where practitioners can speak freely about why some projects fail. This kind of openness in the ICT4D community can help others avoid the pitfalls that lead to wasted time and resources. As a community of practice that we have worked hard to establish, we find it incredibly useful to not just tout our successes (which we should and do) but also to be honest and forthcoming about where we fall short and what we could do differently.

But don’t just take our word for it – we are the organizers, after all. If you want to see what other attendees are saying about the D.C. FailFaire, check out TechChange’s blog or Anand Varghese’s recap. Thanks to all who came, and for making FailFaire not a #fail but indeed – a success!

(Written with Anoush Rima Tatevossian and Katrin Verclas)