One of the cardinal rules of blogging is don’t do it when you’re drunk. But rules were made to be broken. I’m drunk and I’m blogging. And I will hit publish before I’m sober. You have been warned.
Towards the end of the excellent Moseley Barcamp I found myself a little drunk sitting at the back with Ben Whitehouse having a bit of a, well, let’s call it a BitchCamp. What we were bitching about shall remain in the realm of all drunken conversations but at that moment one of us, I think it was Ben, suggested doing a Barcamp which wasn’t all about the amazing things people had done and instead looked at the failures, the stuff that didn’t work and the problems inherent in this stuff. I think. Ben’s sort of on record as having a healthy skepticism about the Birmingham social media scene – the phrase “Brumtwitter mafia” emerged tonight – and while I might not agree with the details I like his attitude. I think it’s important.
Meanwhile I’m getting bored. Well, maybe bored is the wrong word but I want to shake things up a bit. The way I see it once you’ve got something established it’s time to move on. Sure, there’s an important case for sticking around and solidifying this new thing but that doesn’t interest me and there’s no point pretending. I want to be excited and amused. Going over stuff that’s worked well is good and important but the notion of slapping any complacency about how utterly fabulous the Brum Interwebs community is with a big fish and turning it all on its head appeals no end.
And so FAILCamp was born. As a joke. And then I tweeted it which made it real. And then people retweeted it which meant it had to happen. And now I’m blogging about it which means it’s really going to happen. When and where I don’t know, but it will.
I think there’ll be two prongs to this. One the one hand there’s Ben’s “oh for crying out loud enough already” strand which I’ll let him expand on but I’m sure it’ll be provocative, necessary and above all fun. A bubble-busting reality check, if you like.
And on the other hand there’s my take on this. One of the major tenets of social media is that failure is good. When the cost of doing stuff drops to zero you can afford to fail so failure becomes part of the process. Jon Bounds is a great example of someone who uses failure effectively. Jon seemingly launches a new project every other day be it a blog, a collaborative Google map or some other thing. Most of them don’t gain traction and fade into obscurity but those that do succeed do so in really interesting ways. And, I believe, without that constant failure Jon’s take on the Internet wouldn’t be half as radically insightful.
So that’s the basis for FAILCamp. A day where you tell us about your online experiments or experiences that went horribly, terribly wrong. If you’re sick of social media “experts” like myself saying the brave new online world is full of WIN this is the event for you. And if you’ve found a big bucket of WIN by learning from repeated FAIL this is also the event for you. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even engage in a group hug. It’s FAILCamp.
(And it’s nothing to do with last July’s FAILCamp which I just found out about – amusingly that took place at IndyHall which I mentioned in my talk today. Deeply intertwingled indeed.)
Revisiting the past at yet another talking shop is moving on and doing something new?
Not saying it’s necessarily a bad idea or anything.
Pete – I think this is a brilliant idea: drunk or sober. And sometimes you just have to wait a few years. One example: a bunch of us developed Communities Online back in the mid 1990s as a network for people developing local online communities … got sponsorship, ran conferences, etc, but it failed because there weren’t enough people online, the business/volunteer models were not sustainable, people in the group had different priorities and so. Now it would be different … but there’s a danger for anyone setting up a network of falling into the same traps.
Telling stories of the past could help us focus better on the future.
I grabbed an interview with Clay Shirky last year and asked how he would advise anyone interested in the way that social media brings social change to explore what really makes a difference. He said go and talk in depth to the people who have really tried, and failed. Instead of looking for lists of “best practices” look for the real stories of what works, and what doesn’t.
http://socialreporter.com/?p=459
It’s brilliant (note backslap) and very British. Has the feeling of the Kebab panel at SXSW in shaking things up, going against the prevailing vibe but I can see it being very useful. Failure is easier to break down and understand.
Lovin it, Lovin it, Lovin it. In fact I can think of a Big Fail of mine that actually made me learn a hell of a lot. Stick us down for a FAILpanel, babs.
Thanks for the phrase “radically insightful”, I might start to use that in my publicity ;)
That we learn more from failure than success is pretty much a given — but it takes time to get into a mindset where you can fail without it knocking your confidence to try something else. Tons and tons of things I’ve tried have gone tits up — you do have to chuck enough stuff at the “wall” of the interwebs to find out what sticks.
Completely agree with the need to acknowledge and share projects that went wrong and this goes way broader than just social media. Can’t remember which US company (Linden Labs?) asks that their employees wear shrek ears when they mess up. This isn’t a bullying version of a dunce-cap but a way of encouraging people to ask what went wrong and share their knowledge.
The challenge is around funded projects. Whilst we should embrace the sharing of our more ‘challenging experiences’, we are all too often in competition for tiny amounts of money which makes us afraid that admitting failure will prejudice assessment of our next idea/application.
Se you there, then; if I don’t tun up at the wrong venue, or on the wrong day…
I would love to come to FAILCamp and am happy to bring along my failed business plan and any failed funding proposals I can fish out.
The idea that by bringing together lots of failures some people might be able to find in the gaps something successful is good enough, but so too is the possibility of some failure champions (oh God, I said it) who can help change the culture that makes people involved in failed projects/ideas feel like curling up into a corner and never darkening anyone’s doorstep again.
My biggest failed project forced me to shift and change direction in a way that no other support structure could have done, and it improved my confidence, hard as it was at the time.
Great idea! We can certainly learn a lot from failure…the sad thing is that people tend to hide their failures from others – that somehow to ‘fail’ is in someway unacceptable!
We blogged about this topic a while back on the Chain Reaction blog – ‘What Do We Learn from Success Stories’ http://bit.ly/MqtSg
I think this a great idea!
Even though you were tweeting drunk you managed to get my surname correct. Good work Pete!
I’m very excited about this idea and it seems to have legs. Lots of positive energy flowing to the idea.
Love the idea – have been thinking of something similar for a while, following chats with @tobybarnes. Also off the back of the fact that the Suxorz panel @ SXSWi was probably the most entertaining and informative.
Can I make a plea that it’s not just restricted to Brum or even WM-based case studies, though? Overdoing the naval-gazing about “the Brum interwebs” could be a session in itself. The work that goes on here – good and bad – needs to be put in more of a national and international context, methinks.
Would love to see a session on lessons learned (or not!) from major music industry fail over DRM, for example. Saw a great – and very honest – talk on this from some guy from Sony at a NESTA event last year. Would be a good’un.
How about thinking about diversity issues? Asking some awkward questions about class and ethnicity of social media community…talk to Dr Z.