#mediamonday: Talking about Failure
“We often focus on highlighting successes in our field–the use of technology in social change and international social development–but it’s no secret that many projects just don’t work.” –Katrin Verclas, MobileActive
In the world of international development–whether it be in media, information and communications technology, infrastructure, or other fields–competition for funding is fierce, especially in times of economic uncertainty. This contributes to an environment where failure is kept secret, while even the tiniest developments that mimic success are hailed as achievements in reports to donors and organizational boards of directors. Organizations that compete for limited resources do not want to share their failures for fear of losing funding to others in their field. Fail sharing, however, could help these organizations avoid duplicating mistakes, saving them much time, money, and energy.
MobileActive understands this. That is why on December 14, 2011, the organization hosted FAILFaire, bringing together technologists and NGOs to talk about failed development projects. The participants were diverse; representatives came from such organizations as Witness.org, World Lung Foundation, and UNICEF, among others.
The inaugural FAILFaire took place on April 14, 2010, and it was anything but a failure; last week’s event was the fourth in the series. The second FAILFaire was held in August 2010 and was featured in the New York Times. The World Bank hosted the third event in Washington, D.C. in October 2011, the first time it had been held outside New York City. Slate was there to embrace failure with about one hundred people from the international development community. FAILFaire DC inspired the World Bank to conduct its own internal FAILFaire, which prompted some advice for conducting fail sharing events.
Read MobileActive’s wrapup of the latest FAILfaire event: The Top Ten Ways to Fail in Tech for Social Change.
Other fail sharing examples:
- Chris Fabian of UNICEF writes about his “failure to incubate an innovation inside UNICEF.”
- The National Democratic Institute recognizes the importance of talking about failure in its posts Failing Successfully and Practice Makes Perfect, or How We Fail Early and Succeed Late.
- Another fail sharing initiative is Admitting Failure by Engineers Without Borders, an organization that has gone so far as to publish an annual report on its failures.
- Earlier this year, the development blog Tales from the Hood held a discussion about failure: The Second Aid Blog Forum: Admitting Aid Failure?
- Share your failures here!
So it seems development organizations are beginning to realize that talking about failures is as important as talking about successes. That said, has the buzz about FAILFaire hit the media development field? The Columbia Journalism Review published an interesting piece back in August 2010 entitled We Need a FailFaire for Journalism Startups. CJR asked “What if journalists had their own FailFaire?” In the media development field, there is a lot of talk about collaboration, particularly on standards for monitoring and evaluation, but has the question “What if media development organizations had their own FailFaire?” been uttered?
Perhaps it is time to ask.
What do you think?
