I had a great weekend on retreat (more on that story later).
Moseley Barcamp was happening as I arrived back, wasn’t planning on going but was summoned.
I’d missed the first half and ended up leaping in with a comment about the Birmingham echo chamber, the fact it feels like there’s a limited number of people & that my comments weren’t the usual back slapping comments & I’d end up killed by the Brum Twitter mafia. (I was on a bit of a roll)
Pete Ashton and I ended up chatting bitching at the back (he claims he was drunk but I didn’t think he was). I’ve had an idea lurking in the back of my mind for a couple of months about having an event celebrating failure in it’s manifold forms.
It seems every event I go to people get up, talk about how great they are, how great their website is, how great the Birmingham community is and I agree with these notions but their website didn’t plop onto the interwebs fully formed. There must have been ideas rejected, things trialed, stuff that cocked up and I’m interested in those things.
I think this idea is born of a desire for more authenticity with the friends and collaborators around. It’s easy to start believing your own hype and actually, God help us, people around you might start that your bullshit is something else than bullshit too. Standing up & honestly talking about the usually private failures excites me. I’ve got a host of failures knocking around.
Failure is the stuff that glues together to create success. Edison says that he doesn’t fail he’s just found thousands of ways not to make a lightbulb.
Come to me, all you who fail & together we’ll find patterns, learn from you, and laugh.
Here’s a picture of me. Here’s what Obama thinks about failure:
Making your mark on the world is hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it. But it’s not. It takes patience, it takes commitment, and it comes with plenty of failure along the way. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. it’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.
An initial idea unchecked with anyone for suitability is to hold it on the 17th of October. Pop it in your diary.
Go for it, I’ll put it in my calendar. Lot’s of truth in the amount of failiure about, it’s. Very quick and easy to try stuff – so loads of it fails.
Can’t agree that people were talking about how great their websites are/were tho’. Been to three wxwm-type things and haven’t heard one person do a “look at my website” spiell. Most talks are about the minutiae of community (and loads could apply offline too)
Great event idea. You’re still wrong about the supposed mafia, though.
We know were you live…
I don’t mind being wrong. I’d rather put something out there & discover I’m wrong but I’ll keep asking the question.
We seem to devote a lot of time to dispelling the myth that there is a mafia/clique/cabal/shadowy group of leaders. It’s just something I’ve noticed so I’ve asked about it.
Just read about this on Pete Ashton’s blog, and am just going to reiterate here what I said there…
…that this is a great idea!
We blogged a while ago about this on the Chain Reaction blog – ‘What Do We Learn from Success Stories’ and got quite a bit of feedback then http://bit.ly/MqtSg
Count me in for the event!
Laura
This is a great idea. I hope you can make it take place. I’ll certainly try and make my way to it. There are definitely lessons to share from some of the projects I’ve been working on in the third sector / social media sphere.