Last night at a dinner with Ivan Krstić and Itamar Shtull-Trauring, we were all lamenting that too many (all?) software conferences focus specifically on positive results. This is what you want, of course, if you treat a conference as purely a marketing venue. However, most learning takes place based on something that someone did wrong and then needed to correct, not something that they did right.
All of the great software developers I know have at least one great story of how a project they were working on was a complete disaster. Often these projects are shielded from the public eye, since nobody wants to talk about failure. So, how do we make a public discussion of these ideas socially acceptable?
Thus, an idea was born: FAILcon. The idea is simple: submitted talks and papers must be related to projects which failed in an interesting way. The larger the better, of course — the bigger they are, the harder they fail — but anything that failed in an interesting way would be a valid subject for discussion.
I'm writing about it so that it won't be forgotten, because I think it's a great idea. But I doubt that any of us are going to organize a conference any time soon. So please, steal this idea. Does anyone out there with conference-organizing skills want to get something together based around the common theme of failure?
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The first problem that I can think of is that nobody would want to sponsor such a con, but then I remembered that, no, vendors are whores, and they will put their logo on just about anything. (OT: love this, which I found while searching for examples of vendor logo whoring.)
I just registered failcon.com, .net, .org and .info... if anyone wants to actually host a conference I'll point dns towards them. Otherwise I might have to recover costs by hosting conference drinking photos that end in FAIL. :)
I would love to attend and participate in such a conference ! As a graduate student, I find it extremely frustrating that there are no academically accepted venues for presenting interesting negative results of experiments. Much more of a learning opportunity as the original post says.
That would be the most kickass conference ever. Count me in.
I'd be more than happy to try to get
LiquidPlanner to buy a sponsorship provided we could come and talk about some of the UI and naming features that we tried during our beta that were a FAIL!
You could try thedailywtf.com and its community.
too bad Ivan didn't turn his pycon keynote into the first example of this....
Someone's beat you to this idea ;-)
FailCamp is July 26, 2008 in Philadelphia.
http://failcamp.org/
funny enough, I was thinking of a similar thing a few days ago; an online database of failed projects. People could submit small or large failed projects for others to learn from. For this purpose, I registered failbase.org. I'd be happy to hear from any of you, if you'd like to start something. contact me at "contact at leonard dash ritter dot com"
LOL, it'll never happen. Nice try, close but no cigar.
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
This is a fantastic idea -- we really need a place to publish peer-reviewed papers that have negative results. I feel that this type of conference must be even more critically reviewed than a standard "positive results" conference/journal because of the number of submissions it would attract.
Furthermore, without peer review, it becomes very difficult to build a collection of reliable information that can be re-used in other areas. We can't merely provide a dumping ground for all papers that didn't succeed, or we'll have done nothing but increase the level of noise in the scientific community (assuming this fail organization was ever even recognized by the scientific community) To boil it down, there seem to be three critical aspects for this to work:
* Peer review
* Content that can be referenced
* community acceptance
There are other people who think along the same lines. One I've come across: http://jinr.site.uottawa.ca/
Good news: There's already a FailCamp happening immediately before RubyFringe starts on July 18th here in Toronto, ON.
I don't think there's a site set up, but here's the Facebook event:
FailCamp
Sign me up!
I love the concept, but I'm not quite sure it will work.
I sketched out a quick idea in response. Let me know what you think.
I see this all the time in the field of Computational Intelligence. The basic feeling is: `if an algorithm isn't faster or producing better results then why should I care'. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) has set up a workshop to talk about when research fails called What Went Wrong and Why. I agree that scientific insights come not just from positive results but from negative results as well.
GDC, the Game Developer's Conference, often has sessions and round tables on failures. They are definitely enlightening!
Max
For marketing purposes (i.e., for marketing to the "typical" conference crown), it might be more effective to use the term "lessons learned". Or to set up an alternative page advertising the conference that potential (truly interested participants) could pass along to their higher-ups for approval to attend. I'm thinking: just have a mirror-image page that replaces FAIL with "LESSONS-LEARNED"... sort of.
This would allow people who are in larger organizations to attend and present -- potentially without attribution -- real-life war stories, on their company's dime.
Quite frankly, I believe that people learn as much, if not more, from the failed cases as they do from the successful ones. It would be critical for each participant / contributor to identify what the critical FAILURE factors were (vs. critical success factors -- CSF). Perhaps this could be open for discussion for the final 5 minutes of the talk.
In any case, I strongly encourage you to organize such a conference. Some learn by experience; others are fortunate enough to learn by others' experiences.
Every software developer should be familiar with the Risks Digest. Lots of great stuff there including dissection of failures.
Putting out the wrong date for the conference would really make the concept round.
If anyone is interested in joining us in Philadelphia for FailCamp, we'd love to have you! Just be sure to RSVP on upcoming:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/809731/
-Alex, IndyHall
Yo! GMTA, I guess?
I'm the co-originator of FailCamp - http://www.failcamp.org. We're putting on the very first ever real one on July 26 in Philadelphia. (There's a mini version going on July 19th at RubyFringe in Toronto.)
If all goes well - the expected level of fail, without too much meta fail - we will create materials to help promote Failcamps around the world.
Embrace the fail!
I love this idea. Use the failcon.com domain to post updates. Treat it like an alpha software project. Maybe by 2010 failcon will be GA!
I have some conference planning experience, and would love to be involved... in my copious free time, of course.
It should be noted, by the way, that there *are* a couple of speakers who use failure as a way to communicate the value of a technique or tool. This is even somewhat common at conferences like LISA, but it's *RARE* to find a *whole* talk that *revolves* around failure. That would be awesome.
Also, google for an OSCON talk by r0ml about being a bozo. It's a fantastic talk that explains a little about why something like failcon probably hasn't happened yet. Nobody wants to be viewed as a bozo. r0ml explains it much, much better.
There's journal of negative results (in biomedicine but same idea): http://www.jnrbm.com/
This is important because of the "file-drawer effect"
@brian: disclosure: r0ml is my father.
This would be a success commercially and should be mandatory. Gracefully handling a failure and mitigating it is more important than riding successes. More software projects fail than succeed. Why look at the 20% side of the 80/20 rule?
Not sure how frequently this is read, but good ideas seem to be had at roughly the same time everywhere.
I'm a conference/event organizer in San Francisco, hosting SF Beta, SNAP Summit and others. I am planning a half-day event - that I was going to call FailCon - for late February/early March.
I would like it to focus on companies that received funding and support and still didnt make it. I would like their - ideally now successful - founders to speak on the mistakes. I know, people don't like to speak on this, but I am confident I can get people out of their shell.
Please let me know if you are interested in helping. Also, Wes, I'd love to take those domains off your hands. :)
-=Cassie=-
cep@rfop.biz
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