dangerouslyawesome

The meta/double negative jokes ran wild yesterday, when Philadelphia became home of the first successful FailCamp (again, with the irony).

Joining a wonderfully diverse Philly contingent were some of my best friends from around the world, including Tony Bacigalupo of New Work City in NY, as well as co-organizers Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs (in from Vienna via DC).

And for those of you in Philly and those who planned on coming from afar, but didn’t, consider yourself a successful participant of a meta-fail for failing to attend failcamp. There were a lot of you, so you weren’t alone.

When Amy and I put ourselves on the hook for this event, Amy promised that I wasn’t going to have to do much besides agree to host it at IndyHall. Honestly, she kept her promise. This event was the least work I’ve ever done to pull off a successful event, and that’s not to say that Amy did more work than I did. The fact of the matter is, the beauty of the BarCamp model meant that we could totally wing it and let the participants drive the event.

The Format

Amy and I discussed briefly the night before (yes, you read that right) a loose format for FailCamp. We started with that, and let the day take us for a ride. Since all of the participants seemed to consider the event a success, we wanted to share it for future FailCamps to spin off.

Step 1: Invite everybody. NO discrimination of business, personal, or any other kind of fail. Everyone has made mistakes, so don’t be exclusive. If your RSVP blows up, just find a bigger space. That was our plan, anyway. We had almost 40 people RSVP on upcoming, and ended up having about 60-70% of that show up over the course of the day. I think that’s a reasonable expectation from your RSVP list, so you can use that for basing expectations on. As I mentioned before, many people failed to comply with their RSVP, so account for that, but don’t hold it against them.

Step 2: Set the tone, and lay down the one and only rule Which is, “this is about your failure”. No finger pointing, no blame. We suggested, but never got to execute, on a whistle-blowing technique where if someone was finger-pointing, you shout “FAIL” as loud as you can to interrupt them. It might not be necessary, but it got the room to chuckle.

Step 3: Brainstorm/Icebreaker, or “Lend me your fail” We kicked things off by brainstorming categories within which fail tends to occur. In a matter of minutes, we kicked off with:

• Personal
• Business
• Financial
• Romantic
• Technical
• Spiritual
• Health/Physical
• Education

There were some other failure categories, such as Military and Government, but we felt they were going to be difficult for people to apply to their OWN fails.

From these categories, we asked people to jot down one failure from one category, identify the category as well as the lesson that was learned. We asked people to keep their failures anonymous, to attempt to elicit some of the more emotionally jarring ones. After collecting the anonymous fail-slips, Amy and I read through them, poetry-slam style. After each one, we opened up the room for some discussion around them. Something pretty cool happened: nearly every failure we read was openly admitted to, and discussed with the group. Lessons were learned. Laughs were shared. It was a really positive direction to point the day, and carried us up until lunchtime.

Step 4: Failcamp becomes HelpCamp, or Entreprenur’s Anonymous Some group feedback pre-lunch pointed us in a new direction after lunch. Two specific pieces of feedback, from Christine Cavalier and Blake Jennelle, significantly shaped the rest of our day. Blake pointed out that while he was learning a great deal, he hoped that the takeaway at the end of the day would be uplifting and positive. That brought us back to Christine pointing out how the room got very animated while “coaching” her through some issues with the completion of a novel she’d been writing.

We took that feedback and, on the fly, spun out a new format to try. We set a 10 minute timer and asked people to share a problem/failure they were experiencing at this current period of time, and then within the same 10 minute window, gave the room an opportunity to speed-coach.

This was intensely awesome, as the problems approached ran the gamut of the categories listed above. Furthermore, EVERYONE’s problem that was brought up was coached thoroughly and by a room full of high quality people who had great diversity in their experiences. I really believe that everyone who had an opportunity to share, got to take something away as well. And those who didn’t share still got to learn a great deal by hearing their issues in other contexts. It was EXTREMELY cathartic and holistic.

This went on for another 3 hours or so (all of which zoomed by), at the end of which we were excited, exhausted, and ready for celebration of a day of successful failure, which landed us at our local haunt, National Mechanics.

Overall, the response from the participants as well as those who joined us on our uStream channel, was overwhelmingly positive. We look forward to continuing the “Entreprenur’s Anonymous” event with the help of PhillyPreneurs, so stay tuned for that.

And of course, our sincerest hope is that some other groups can benefit from what we learned during our FailCamp, and help your local scene benefit from your own FailCamp.

Special thanks to everyone who came out, the event would have been NOTHING without you! For me personally, events like this are a great reminder of how brilliant many of my peers are, and how lucky I am to be surrounded by them in order to be able to pull off an event like this.

Viva la Failure!

About 3 weeks ago I announced my departure from Round3 and that I’d be pursuing new work as an independent consultant. The main reason for that announcement was my decision to put focus on continuing to grow IndyHall with Geoff while finding other projects and teams to consult with regarding their user communities, as well as social business practices.

I’m really, really stoked to announce that I’ve teamed up with Anthillz.com, a Philadelphia startup founded by Blake Jennelle. Blake is also the founder of Philly Startup Leaders, and we have become friends over the last year through the similarities that our organizations’ (PSL and IndyHall) goals share.

Anthillz is building out tools to help freelancers and independents manage their reputations by organizing client and peer feedback and helping generate measurable statistics that can help in freelancer searches, as well.

Where do I fit? Well, besides my obvious interest in the value of freelancers and doing things that make it easier to be an independent, Blake and his team realized there was value on community marketing as well as using member feedback to drive their product design process. I’m being brought in to help advise and lead that process, all along the way helping be a liaison for the community and the management team. I’m there for the community, and there for the team, when they need things and will help facilitate interactions between them.

My favorite part? Read this part of the position description that Blake and I drafted together:

When there’s a tension between his roles of representing the company and advocating on behalf of the community, the advocate should take the side of the community.  Any company has the natural tendency to give extra weight to its own interests, and the Community Advocate is an essential counterweight.

Blake wrote, this not me, but it’s attitudes like this that makes me have hope for company leadership in general. Blake and his entire team are as excited about this new partnership as I am.

I look forward to being able to share our findings as we continue to develop Anthillz as a product and a community, and encourage you to check it out and feed back as well!

I’ve got a couple of other similar projects and partnerships in the work, and am excited to share them with you as they unfold. Stay tuned, everybody!

I recently found out about an open source OSX App called Precipitate via Viddler’s Brandice, via Viddler’s Colin Devroe. The original app was created by Stuart Morgan, who I can’t find a freaking thing about except that he participated in last year’s “Google: Summer of Code”. Stuart, if you’re out there, drop me a line. I wanna thank you personally for this app and keeping it open source.

Precipitate is a simple prefpane that, once installed, regularly scans your Google Documents repository for a given Google account (only supports one at a time, right now), and makes those documents available in OSX Spotlight searches.

My only complaint: I’m working in a lot of docs that are changing regularly, so the built in “scan for new/changed files every 60 minutes” interval was too long.

Luckily, as I said, it’s open source. So I pulled down a copy, started poking around Xcode, and found the interval and switched it to every 3 minutes.

I had some compile issues due to a whacked out dev environment, but with the help of Dave Martorana (of MultiFireFox fame) got it compiled and it’s now been running and scanning every 3 minutes.

My version (changing less than a single line of code) is available on my S3 Account, as “Precipitate More Often“. The license is the same as the original. The entire codebase is the same as the original, with the exception of the interval.

Download Now – Precipitate More Often 1.0

Hope you enjoy.

Reading through some comments on yCombinator’s “hacker news” board tonight (which my previous post was just featured on, welcome new readers/subscribers), I dove into a thread about a post I’d read earlier in the day by 37Signals about some of their early guerrilla marketing techniques that they used to generate buzz around their products, ideas, and methodologies.

The comments struck me as interesting: readers were talking a decent amount of smack, as commenters tend to, both on 37 Signals as well as yCombinator‘s co-founder, Paul Graham. The smack centered around the notion that the 37S team, as well as Graham, were notorious for writing about how “easy” it was to be successful.

Interesting, I thought. These people don’t like being told something will be easy. Personally, I’d find that motiviating to try that thing that someone told me was easy. Maybe that’s just my entreprenurial spirit.

“That sounds easy/appealing. I can totally do that”. Who among us hasn’t at least thought that.

I guess my thought was really simply that yes…it is easy, if you get past step 0 of actually deciding to do it in the first place. Which, if you REALLY read into 37Signals’ message, you’ll realize, that’s the point. Just get going.

The rest really is easy, if nothing else, by comparison to the first step.

Uploaded by massdistraction on 15 Jul 07, 10.55PM EDT.

It’s like going to the gym. I’d be ripped if I would just go in the first place.

The next most difficult part to the first step is keeping up your momentum.

Stretching your “stay inspired” muscles.

Toning your “remain motivated” muscles.

Working your “don’t stagnate” muscles.

Flexing your “continually learn” muscles.

That’s all a lot of work.

But, if you’re headed down the so called right path, it’ll feel easy. Because even though it is work, if you’re working smarter instead of harder, it probably won’t feel like work.

And if it does, you’re not flexing those muscles often enough. Or you’re working the wrong muscle groups.

Oh, those inevitable cramps you’re feeling?

Quit your whining and get back to the gym.

Brian Oberkirch is one of only a few people in this world who’s every word I hang on. Brian is a thought leader, in it’s truest form. I’m proud that Brian even knows my name. Enough fanboycrap. On to the thoughts that Brian stirred up for me.

Brian just wrote a post taking a jab at conversational marketing, clearly pointing his pointer finger at the “Misbegotten & generally borked offspring of Cluetrain“. His point is something that drove me to create a Flickr group over 6 months ago, tounge in cheek renouncing the phrase “Join the Conversation”. I ended up not following through with the Flickr group because all that happened every time I looked at it, I got angry.

I hate the phrase “join the conversation” because it encourages the worst thing that conversational marketing could have: dilution of valuable, community contributed information.

“Join the conversation” encourages a poor signal to noise ratio.

“Join the conversation” has bred an entire movement that’s forgotten what the social in social media means.

“Join the conversation” doesn’t mean “listen to me, me-me-me-me-me”.

Conversational marketing doesn’t mean “talk about it until they can’t help but listen”.

Conversational marketing DOES mean that your pitches don’t sound like pitches. Conversational marketing means STOP PITCHING.

Guess what. If you are still trying so hard to be conversational, odds are, it’s coming across as far less genuine than if you aren’t trying at all.

Stop, collaborate and listen (yeah, i went there)

How about listening for a change? Rather than spending all of your time talking about what your customers/partners/vendors/markets/employees/members, whatever might want; ASK THEM.

So what does this boil down to?

I think that you should take a good hard look at your “conversational marketing” techniques and exercise the side of the conversation that most people aren’t terribly good at:

listening.

As the project I’m most passionate about approaches it’s 1st birthday, and the other mission I set out on skims past 4 months since it’s inception, I’ve come to some realizations and the teams from both businesses and I made some tough decisions. Ultimately, this was the result of us doing some introspection and deciding where our goals were. We got lucky, and our goals allowed us to work together in deciding how the two businesses would grow.

The release below, compiled by myself, Geoff DiMasi, and Bart Mroz explains the steps that we’ve taken.

For immediate consideration:

Recognizing that growth and change are a natural part of any organization and knowing how to react to those changes is one of the greatest challenges for a company of any size.

Indy Hall has grown and changed at a rapid pace in this past year and half. As the community has grown, the business and operations have morphed and changed along with it. This agility remains one of our key strengths.

One of the scenarios that we anticipated was a startup (or better, multiple startups) forming within the members of our community. A number of these opportunities have, in fact, materialized. One of them became known as Round3Media, formed by IndyHall board members Alex Hillman and Bart Mroz, along with Ken Rossi. It was initially created to help aid business process between some of the collaboration that was already happening with the members. As that business grew, focus shifted, and the overlapping founders of Round3Media and IndyHall sat down to discuss that growth.

The only way for both of these organizations to thrive is for each of their leaderships to stay focused. It is for that reason that Alex Hillman has stepped down as a partner of Round3Media, LLC. Similarly, Bart Mroz has stepped down as a board member of Independents Hall, LLC.

Respectively, Alex will remain a consultant to the Round3 team, and Bart will remain a full time member of IndyHall.

This decoupling of the businesses is for maintaining the the strength and focus of each organization, and for removing potential conflicts of interest as one business resides within the walls of the other. 

We look forward to both of these operations growing and continuing to add to the success stories of the Philadelphia creative and startup community.

I consider myself lucky to have such wonderful business partners that this potentially sticky situation ended up working out to all of our benefits: we get to continue working with our greatest passions. And, as I’ve said before, I do it all for the love of the game.

Moving forward

I remain wholly dedicated to IndyHall and it’s community, the city of Philadelphia, and the spirit of innovation and creativity in our community and any other communities that I touch.

While continuing on the path we’ve set out on with IndyHall, the Philadelphia community, and our own set of goals, I’m also returning to the life of an independent (rather than the co-owner of two businesses) and beginning to contract my services as a social business strategy advisor and social marketing consultant. I hope to blend my historical experiences in technology, my interests in the web, and my passions for community in a blend that brings unique opportunities for my clients and projects.

I’m already working with a couple of local startups, and am actively pursuing opportunities that fit my interests as well as the best interests of the company I contract with. Additionally, I’m interested in more writing and speaking engagements on the topics that many of you have expressed enjoyment in reading about here on my blog.

Thank you all for your continuing support. I’m truely thrilled to be at this point in my life and be surrounded by great friends, business partners, and immense opportunities.