FAIL: Panel Idea for Internet Librarian 2010
March 17, 2010
Want to present at Internet Librarian 2010 in Monterey? I’m trying to form a panel or track on failures, learning from failed projects, and lessons for techies regarding what doesn’t work. If you’re interested (and your place of work will let you talk about failures), comment below with your contact info or contact me directly. I want to title it REVENGE OF FAIL WHALE but am open to other suggestions 
March 17th, 2010 at 9:48 am
I have a failing portal I built for my researchers. I’m working on fixing it. But 2.0 would not be possible without the failure of 1.0. Let’s connect to chat about it.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:50 am
Mine was actually about my last place of work, but my first experience as as director using technology. I used an open source product to manage our public access computer to get away from clipboards. It took a long time to develop and it crashed beautifully for the public so that no one could use the computers until we shut it down. There is more to the story and I have a few others that are similar.
March 17th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
I don’t have anything to add as far as techy stuff goes, but this is a great subject for a panel!
March 17th, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Clay Shirkey’s book, Here Comes Everybody ( http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/ ), makes the point that open source approaches work precisely because “failure is free” and with enough experiments a few of them will work surprisingly well.
He writes:
http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html
Maybe this [a Wiki crime map] will succeed or maybe it will fail. The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don’t pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible, and I hope that this one succeeds, obviously. But even if it doesn’t, it’s illustrated the point already, which is that someone working alone, with really cheap tools, has a reasonable hope of carving out enough of the cognitive surplus, enough of the desire to participate, enough of the collective goodwill of the citizens, to create a resource you couldn’t have imagined existing even five years ago.
—
I have an open source project as the focus of my PhD research:
http://openallureds.org
During this early gestation phase, I am the primary developer and failures on my part go virtually unnoticed, but I’ve taken the approach of putting my work-in-progress out in public despite the uneven quality. The following link leads to a collection of short proof-of-concept videos for the voice-and-vision enabled dialog system being developed:
http://bit.ly/openallure
Perhaps you would like to join in the “long tail” of contributors to this project–not by making an on-going commitment to it, but by making a single suggestion, just one time. There is a social tool for collecting specifically this type of contribution at
http://www.allourideas.org/openallure
Thanks!
May your failures be successful.
March 23rd, 2010 at 10:43 am
I’ve had a great big follow-through FAIL on one technology-based project in which I tried to mash-up every bit of new, fun technology I could (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious…) into a combined marketing/information literacy juggernaut which I then took on the road and tried to turn into a national phenomenon all the while neglecting my homebase and struggling to figure out how I could maintain this cobbled-together Frankenstein 2.0 by myself while my job description rapidly transformed from Resident Librarian to Reference Librarian to Reference/Outreach/Online/Marketing/Publicity Librarian.
I would *love* to talk about this and what I learned from it alongside other creative FAILers.
March 23rd, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Have you spoken with Rochelle Mazar about Fail? She might be hosting a FailCamp this year: http://twitter.com/rmazar/status/6248668581