Alison Powell—Redefining failure

Tuesday morning’s talk came from Alison Powell of the London School of Economics; it was called “#FAIL: What we learn from failed tech projects.” Powell’s argument was that failure has its uses, and she proposed a new taxonomy of failure.

She explained that she came to this topic because of a series of intersecting interests: [design metaphors, (open source systems, peer production], [{activist knowledge flows)], [net neutrality, freedom of expression} and broadband adoption.] Eventually this led her to study community wireless networks.

We have an image of the internet as a free and open technology, she said. That is to some extent due to its history; early internet theorists saw the internet as a transnational space, separate from government intervention, meaning that its seemed to offer the prospect of genuinely autonomous action. Powell quoted John Perry Barlow’s 1996 Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace: “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

Although this is a particular perspective (white, male, libertarian), Powell argued, it has persisted, with the result that the internet is to some extent “a black box.” This view shapes our experience of the internet. People see things that may not be there—for example, it is still widely perceived as free and open, even though it has become increasingly “enclosed” by major players (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc). So, for example, when we post something on a social media site we know that there’s a social media industry chugging away in the background, but this isn’t foregrounded in our mind. The question: Is this a case of, “Too bad, everything becomes corporate in the end?” Or is there a different way?

This is how Powell came to her interest in community wireless networks, in which people use their own resources to connect to either the world wide web or their own community. Hundreds of such projects arose between about 2000 and 2008, designed according to a variety of organizational and technical models. They were launched with great expectations: they would foster citizen engagement, empowerment, and participation; they would lead to the development of new technologies, policies, and enterprises.

All around the world, however, these projects failed—or were widely considered to have failed. This led Powell to think about the concept of failure.

Looking in the literature, she found failure framed in several ways. Heeks (2005) talks about systemic vs partial failure. Systemic failure is easier to understand, while partial failure has to be recognized as subjective (it may fail according to the goals of some actors, but not others). Kuhn (1963) talks about transparent failure, including planned obsolescence; this may be generative or disruptive, and it often contributes to future learning or progress. A third category would be opaque failure, in which case it is unclear what has failed or how. Such failures may be the result of undeclared goals that are not consonant with the existing policy or legal frames.

For example, with regard to CWNs, there was an expectation that they would foster things like innovation (by modeing the demand for broadband) or changes in social policy (by bridging the digital divide). In interviewing people who had been involved with CWNs, Powell found that they saw their work slightly differently. She grouped them as follows:

Commerce nets (develops new services or business models)
Culture nets (showcases art, culture, or community, or is viewed as an artistic project)
Demo nets (demonstrates the proof of a concept underlying a technology or mode of organization)
Equi-nets (promote community wireless access as a means of addressing the digital divide)
Political-nets (draws attention to political issues and the politics of access to communications)
Picnic-nets (brings together a social net)

In some cases, Powell explained, the apparent failure of the CWNs obscures the fact that the underlying goal, which may not have been recognized by the pre-existing conceptual framework, was actually accomplished. In Serbia, for example, some of the people who had built a picnic-net explained that they had created the CWN to communicate with each other and share files. They soon realized that they could just have picnics every month instead. 

This led Powell to propose a new taxonomy of failures, in which failures can be understood along a variety of considerations: stated and unstated goals, short term and long term outcomes, policy implications (intended or not), structures of participation (elite, grassroots, techie, scale), technological imperative, civic/community/noncommercial implications. She asked the group to brainstorm a variety of failures to think about how they fit into that taxonomy. (Some of the projects cited (and debated): Haystack, One Laptop Per Child, Red Hat, Mozilla.)

In conclusion, Powell argued that we should redefine failure—it’s not always a total #FAIL—and think about the ways that we can learn from failure. A project that has “failed” many nonetheless lead to new design methods and iterative projects that improve on the obsoleted versions; they can also cast light on the effective use of new technologies and cast light on the context in which these developments occur.