Audience participation was not only encouraged, it was mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. We had much laughter as we navel-gazed at where we have all gone wrong in ICT and international development.

Yet don’t forget that we are all here to LEARN from failure. Failure is no reason to be ashamed. Failure shows leadership, innovation, and risk-taking in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ideas from pilots to global programs.

At Fail Faire DC 2012, there was great value in examining our mistakes as we go beyond the easy and the simple. So while we encouraged irreverence and humor, we didn’t forget to learn something too. Fail Faire DC 2012 was hosted by the World Bank on Friday, November 16, in downtown Washington, DC.

Featured Speakers

• Dr. Tessie San Martin, CEO, Plan International USA
• Aleem Walji, Director, Innovation Labs, World Bank Institute
• Patty Mechael, Executive Director, mHealth Alliance
• Sean McDonald, CEO, FrontlineSMS
• Christine Prefontaine, Founder, Facilitating Change
• James Bontempo, Director of ICT & Innovation, JHU-CCP
• Carol Waters, Technical Advisor, Internews
• Merrick Schaefer, Senior Innovation Specialist, World Bank
• Neelley Hicks, Special Projects Manager, United Methodist Communications
• Dustin Homer, Associate, Development Gateway

Event Photos

Wondering how it went? Check out the photo stream from the event.

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Fail Faire UK 2012 was a real celebration of failure as a mark of innovation and risk-taking in international development. We had great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures. Audience participation was not only encouraged, it was mandatory!

We are all peers and none of us is perfect. We had much laughter as we navel-gazed at where we have all gone wrong in ICT and international development.

Yet don’t forget that we all LEARNED from failure. Failure is no reason to be ashamed. There are many types of failure, with only the failure to learn being worthy of scorn.

Fail Faire UK 2012 happened on July 18th at the GSMA Head Office. Fail Faire UK 2012 was brought to you by GSMA Development Fund and ICTworks. We had light refreshments to lubricate the conversation and there was an after-party to continue the celebration.

Featured Speakers

• Tim Unwin, CEO, Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation
• Martin Harris, Programme Director, GSMA Development Fund
• Wayan Vota, Senior Director, Inveneo
• Alan McNeil Jackson, Chief Technical Officer, Aptivate
• Victor Lyons, Visiting Research Fellow, Royal Institution of Great Britain & CEO, ReadingWise
• Harsha Liyanage, Principal Consultant, eNovation4D Associates, UK
• Partick Hall, Language Technology Kendra, Kathmandu

Learnings

We had an amazing sharing of failure at Fail Faire UK 2012, and amidst the laughter at how wrong we can be in deploying information and communication technologies to accelerate social and economic development, there were key lessons to learn. Lessons that cost millions of dollars, and unless we internalize them, will cost untold millions in future repetition.

So in the hopes that we can reduce future fails and increase success in ICT4D, I present to you the 8 lessons to learn from Fail Faire UK 2012:

1. Failure will happen: When I am asked how to avoid failure I say that you should hire optimists. Why? Because failure will happen. It is the natural, normal, and valid result of pushing the boundaries of what is possible to scale from pilots to real impact. If you are not failing, you’re not trying hard enough, and you need optimists to recognize that failure is the mark of innovation and risk taking – key to growth and actual social and economic development that we all espouse to achieve.
2. Timing is everything: Martin Harris worked hard on his startup idea, then took a two week vacation. On the day he sought financing for his venture, his first day back from vacation, Lehman Brothers collapsed. His grand plans of a venture capital-based future disappeared faster than the elevator ride to his appointment. Note to self: when you have a good idea, move fast as you never know what tomorrow brings.
3. Know your target market habits: Harsha Liyanage thought farmers in Sri Lanka would be excited about trading via SMS. After two years of development and two years in deployment, he learned that farmers don’t trade via SMS. They want face-to-face interactions with local actors. The farmer’s wife or children do love modern technologies, and by leveraging their excitement for Facebook, Harsha was able to move from failure with farmers to success with social networking as a medium to connect farming families with new buyers.
4. People are proud of their heritage: Patrick Hall thought he could help Nepalese localize software into the local language to accelerate ICT adoption, but found multiple challenges – donors wanted to run their own programs, private software companies wanted to do their own localization, and Nepalese wanted either an exact translation (without agreement on what “exact” was) or just use English. I’ve found this same issue in Tanzania, where the Microsoft translation of Windows and Office into Kiswahili is disliked because its Kenyan-accented Kiswahili.
5. Take the money and run: Victor Lyons somehow bungled venture capital offerings of over $80 million when he founded an ecommerce startup, and after his business, marriage, and life went down in flames, found himself in India trying to used printed brochures to educate people who couldn’t read. Rather than giving up, he founded a literacy program, which received over a million dollars in funding – but none for salaries. His lesson learned multiple times is that money, in fact, does make the world go around, and we should not be too arrogant or too humble to accept it.
6. Plan for succession: Too often we invest inordinate amount of responsibility and success into a few key actors. Allan McNeil Jackson did in his company, Aptivate, and when his two key salespeople left, it almost destroyed the company. It took every member of the organization rethinking their role and joining in the sales process to revive relationships and the company’s future.
7. Be convinced of your convictions: Pamela McLean has spent the last 12 years trying to convince others of the worth and opportunity if development in Nigeria, often in a Quixotic effort to raise awareness that Nigeria does have promise and possibility. Yet she has not given up hope or slowed her pace of advocacy even though she was easily the most senior participant in Fail Faire UK 2012. For her energy alone, we should all be humbled.
8. The only constant is change: Tomi Davies single-handedly worked to bring One Laptop per Child to Nigeria. He was amazingly successful – President Obasanjo agreed to buy 1 million XO laptops from Nicholas Negroponte in 2007, jumpstarting the OLPC program. In fact, that deal is why the XO is green and white – the colors of the Nigerian flag. Unfortunately, Tomi then had to contend with 6 different Minsters of Education over the next 6 years, a revolving ministerial door that is not unique to Africa.

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Projects succeed, projects fail. The successes are reported on, the failures are filed away. Or, in the case of most international development and ICT4D projects, pushed under the proverbial rug. Well, its time to bring out the failures, with a sense of humor, and with an honest look at ourselves. Hence was born Fail Faire.

Fail Faire DC featured projects using ICT in international development that have, to put it simply, been a #FAIL. Busted, kaputt. Tongue firmly in cheek, we take a close look at what didn’t work and why projects fail amidst the ICTD hype.

We believe that only if we understand what DOESN’T WORK in this field and stop pushing our failures under the rug, can we collectively learn and get better, more effective, and have greater impact as we go forward.

Fail Faire DC 2011 happened on October 13th at the World Bank and was brought to you by the World Bank, Development Gateway, Inveneo, and Jphiego.

Featured Speakers

• Dr. Tessie San Martin, CEO, Plan International USA
• Ian Schuler, Internet Freedom Programs, U.S. Department of State
• Erin Mote, Chief of Party, USAID Global Broadband and Innovations Alliance
• Andrea Bosch, ICT Advisor and Chief of Party, TILO Egypt, Creative Associates
• Dr. Harshad Sanghvi, Vice President of Innovations & Medical Director, Jhpiego
• Kristin Peterson, CEO & Co-founder, Inveneo
• Brian Forde, President, Llamadas, S.A.
• Allison Stone, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
• Peter Bauman, Conflict Specialist, International Relief & Development
• Jacobo Quintanilla, Director of Humanitarian Media, Internews Network
• Ed Anderson, World Bank, on their 70% ICT4D failure rate
• Sean DeWitt, Technology Programs Manager, Grameen Foundation
• Gerhard Pohl, Senior Director, Development Gateway

Post-Event Coverage

The learning was more than just in the room too. Online and in-person, here are several ways to stay in the FailFaireDC theme:

1. Read Plan’s CEO on her experience. Dr. Tessie San Martin has a great write up of her thoughts on FailFaireDc and failure in general.
2. Read the Slate.com article. We had deep coverage, complete with the academic underpinnings to our erstwhile activities.
3. Join Admitting Aid Failure, the second Aid Blog Forum. The aid bloggers are taking our idea to the Internets.
4. Check out the FailFaireDC photos on Flickr. Relive your favorite slides and remember your favorite presenters.
5. Engage via the #FailFaireDC hashtag on Twitter. During and after the event, #FailFaireDC was trending on Twitter as we discussed the larger themes and issues to improve ICT4D
6. Look for a FailFaireNYC. Mobile Active is teaming with Unicef to have a FailFaire in New York City this December.

Most of all, remember to fail in everything you do. Only then are you showing leadership and innovation in pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scaling ICT and international development.

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