FAILCamp » Planning stuff

Back in business.

ben — Sun, 09 May 2010 13:10:21 +0000

Hello there, sorry for the silence.

I could make something pithy and intelligent sounding about the reason behind the silence. Taking time to reflect etc. Truth is it’’s my own mini-failure. I didn’t save the admin address anywhere and didn’t want to admit I’d got something wrong.

So we’re back. Planning is going ahead for the event (hoping to announce an exact date soon) and looking forward to sharing failure with you.

Pete out, you in?

Pete Ashton — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 16:10:49 +0000

I, as in Pete Ashton, am pulling out of doing FailCamp. My reasons, for what they’re worth, are on my blog but suffice to say it’s nothing to do with the event and all to do with me.

We’ve seen a lot of enthusiasm for this happening – Screen West Midlands in particular have offered support, both financial and in kind – and Ben is still very much on board. So if you like the FailCamp notion and want to be one of the people who makes it happen the opportunity is there.

It occurs to me we don’t have a central contact point for this thing but Ben’s manning the FailCamp Twitter and you can contact me though the usual channels. I might not be able to run FailCamp but I’m more that happy to help it happen.

Here’s to failure!

Whatever happened to the Birmingham City Council website?

Pete Ashton — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:20:09 +0000

FAILcamp seems to have sparked an investigation. A few years ago Birmingham City Council announced they were to have a spangly new website but very little has been heard since. Paul Dale posted a report on the Birmingham Post site today indicating it’s another Capita-related snafu but, in the spirit of FAILcamp we want to know how this happened. What made the FAIL here? Can lessons be learned?

Josh Hart has started an investigation with new startup Help Me Investigate (and it’s worth noting that while he started it HMI is all about collective investigation and not axe-grinding) while Mike Cummins has submitted an FOI request.

If you’d like to help unravel this mystery join the HMI investigation or drop Josh a note on Twitter.

And then we’ll collectively present our findings at FAILcamp.

Give us your design skills for free please

Pete Ashton — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:23:17 +0000

If we’re going to have t-shirts, and I’d love us to have t-shirts, then we’re going to need something to go on them. And we could really do with a logo of some kind, even if it is just Impact in bold with an outline. Which is what I used to throw this together in five minutes:

I invited The Twitter to improve on this atrocity and a couple of submissions came through:

Martin Fearn ran with the misspelling and gave us this:

While Woodrow Phoenix ran with the cat motif and gave us this rough draft:

In the traditional spirit of design competitions like this the winner will get absolutely nothing at all save a credit somewhere while everyone else will get a mild sense of disappointment over wasted effort.

Twitter a link to your design @brumfailcamp or leave it in the comments to this post. Thenk Ewe.

Wadayawanna Talk About?

Pete Ashton — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:54:09 +0000

It’s far too early to plan this thing in any details, so let’s start planning this thing in detail.

If you were to come to FAILcamp what would you talk about? What sort of story would you tell?

No need to tell the actual story here – just give us an idea of where your mind is at.