It's good to fail... fast

A little under a month ago, some friends and I announced an offer to launch a free service - free to set up, free to use, free to leave, free of advertising. The service is a way of getting up and running with a modern, social web site - that's the technology - and a community of willing helpers collaborating to get better results for everyone.

It was for a specific niche - UK churches. It was to address a specific, known problem - that (according to a recent study) the vast majority of UK churches don't have a current, active website at all. And of those that do, a small proportion are interactive as well as active - that is, most church websites are brochures to read rather than communities meeting and welcoming others.

We had direct experience (independently of one another) of some of the underlying issues. Many churches struggle making decisions involving expenditure more complicated than buying another box of tea bags. People with relevant skills often feel put upon, expected to do for free what they are normally hired to do, and faced with unrealistic expectations ("you do websites, don't you?" = "I don't care if you're a back end developer, a front-end developer, a designer or an account manager, just make my problem go away, now!"). And the "norm of niceness" that infects so many churches means that everyone knows what they don't want, few will be willing to turn their vague thoughts into definite ideas, and a dominant voice will effectively dictate the outcome.

We didn't think we wanted to tackle those issues - there are plenty of companies selling outdated, proprietary CMS-driven websites to churches, driven by their ability to navigate the particular buying and implementation processes. Good luck to them! Most are well-intentioned, at least, and a few are quite good.

Instead, we saw an opportunity. We're people who know how the technology works and how costs build up, and so we were able to define a technical solution that would cost a few hundred pounds up-front to create, a few tens of pounds a month to run, plus time and goodwill. We decided to build on WordPress, because (a) it works, (b) it has a vast resource base, (c) the software is free to take, use and adapt. We identified multiple ways to create the service, and looked at take-on (making it easy to get people from nothing to something nice-looking and actually usable) and push-off (making it easy to get people off our platform and onto their own or someone else's). And we did technical validation - yes, it works in practice as well as in theory.

So we got to the 'ready enough' point. We knew we could create the service, and we knew our way around the detailed options we would be choosing between. So we knew we could build a real, live service to meet the promise with a few more hours of work up-front, and a reasonable enough workload in terms of hours per week post launch.

So we launched. Sort of.

Specifically, we said we'd launch the live service if 50 UK churches wanted a website for free. To signal this, they had to tweet a hashtag, like a facebook page or fill in an online form. All of these things required a small amount of effort, and we didn't work hard on promotion.

We got into double figures, but nowhere near the 50. So we won't launch. (I predicted we wouldn't!)

We failed. We failed fast. It's good to fail fast.

You can't fail unless you try. Most people talk a lot about things they want to do, very few try to do them.

Until you fail, it's hard to learn. Most projects exist in a kind of twilight world, where the expectations and effort have gone down, but there's still a dream. By saying "we've failed - and we're moving on," you get to look at things objectively.

And when you fail fast, there aren't so many loose ends to tie up. There's no long, painful running uphill, draining your practical and emotional resources to the dregs. So the learning you achieved, you can apply. Or you can choose another venture. Either way, you start with a positive attitude and a bit of momentum, released by being prepared to say, "That's it. We failed. Now, what shall we do?" Well, almost every meaningful success has come off the back of one, several, many failures. The trick is to welcome failure, and fail fast.

Or, as Samuel Beckett said, "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

Breakthrough?

Your mobile phone is a decent way of accessing the Internet just about anywhere.  Not brilliant, maybe, but good enough for all sorts of stuff.  Email, facebook, simple web searches, news and so on.

Traditionally, mobile operators have caned their customers for the privilege of viewing a tiny page slowly (and especially for those occasions when your browser can't support the massive graphics-rich page coming down the line). Why? The myth (OK, ancient truth) that mobile browsing is a premium service.

Nonsense!

But like it or not, this has been the approach and still generally is.

At last, Asda (which uses the Vodafone network) has changed the rules. Look:

Pay-as-you-go Internet Pricing

Price per MB

500p Virgin

400p Tesco

300p O2

    20p Asda

Obscure Orange, 3, T-Mobile, Vodafone

Checked today, but I make no representation about the accuracy or comprehensiveness of this information

'Obscure' means that the website doesn't want to give you the detail - assume the worst!

By the way, most of the operators offer either some kind of daily maximum  or/and daily, weekly or monthly bundles.  But for the most part, these position Internet at £1-2 a day. Much more than you are paying for high speed home broadband.

What can you get for £1?  Not much, perhaps, but too much, and in particular it's lousy knowing that each time you check and update facebook it will be costing you 30p or so.

So three cheers for Asda, assuming I'm reading their policy correctly.  If I make the occasional, casual email check etc, I'll spend pennies a day.  Well, I'm happy to do that any day, so suddenly it makes sense to make my mobile the default Internet access for all sorts of things.  Even a photo upload will be around the cost of a call (8p per minute, three cheers for that too). Almost all the mobiles in the house can download and run Opera Mini, which acts as a kind of middleman to the web, limiting the amount of data going back and forth and making most sites designed for PCs easy enough to use on phones, so suddenly it all makes sense.

Funnily enough, I'm pretty confident that if the others follow suit, their revenues will grow significantly (or to be techy, they will increase ARPU).  Because most people never use their phone for browsing. Bad technical experiences and fear of uncertain costs have ensured that.

Come on, guys.  Or am I going to have to trade up to Asda?

Another nerdy moment

Thanks, eBay.

My 'good enough' phone died. It didn't cost much - I bought it as 'refurbished' which actually just meant a scruffy box. It had Edge - fast enough Internet access to be usable for most purposes, even uploading the odd photo to my blog. It had Wi-Fi. But it seemed half-finished. Even really, really basic stuff like entering text had horrible quirks. I couldn't use capitals with T9 text entry; editing text would occasionally mangle it. Synchronising my address book was fine but the calendar wasn't. I won't name the manufacturer or model, because I think it's an aberration. But in any case, it's turned up its virtual toes and is going back to the store for a refund.

I had hoped it would fill the gap left by my ancient and now defunct Wi-Fi phone, and do enough of the stuff my old Windows Mobile used to do that I wouldn't be too sad. No chance.

So I confess I rather fancied an iPhone, but not on an ordinand's salary. I nearly bought a PDA - with canny buying through Quidco or Expansys a decent one comes in at around £100. I toyed with various smartphones, but on proviso they had to be network-independent. But I found I was eithergoing to pay the same £100-ish for something that didn't do all the jobs I had in mind or nearer £400 for something that did.

So for about £30 I bought a used version of my old, quirky, cumbersome phone. I re-installed SBSH Facade to improve the interface, I re-installed Olivetree Bible Reader (free software, free versions including ASV and NET Bible, paid-for NRSV). And by the magic of synchronisation, everything else including my address book, tasks and my OneNote Mobile database of notes, recordings and photos reappeared.

I'm not expecting this one to last for years. We had two the same before (ahhhhhh...) and both died of the same thing - the mini-USB port broke meaning they couldn't be charged. No doubt that will happen again. But for now, I'm typing this on my £150 eBay laptop which is plugged in to my £30 eBay Windows Mobile phone, which curiously doubles up as a DAB radio so that I can take BBC7 with me. I pay on average £5 a month for calls and the occasional browse on-the-move. Technology on a budget. And just think what I'm doing for the environment ;)

A nerdy moment

My windows mobile died, sigh. I've played with all the mobiles in the house, but it turns out the best is my trusty old Nokia 3100. Horribly basic, but because it's so common, everything works, everywhere. Or if something doesn't, people fall over themselves to sort it out. My funky wi-fi mobile works brilliantly when all's well, but abandon hope any time there's the slightest glitch.

Of course I'm missing Bluetooth, micro SD, a screen that I can read in moderate sun but this phone just works and goes on working. It even takes Opera Mini.

Nokia, I salute you.

Liminality

Well, I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've used that word.

A time of transitions. For Cambridge ordinands, term began last week, and I have now completed two 'Federation Intensives,' namely Race Awareness (excuse the dated sounding name) and Godly Play.

Having worked in the Caribbean, and been had similar corporate training, my expectations for this course that is compulsory for all at some stage were a little mixed. The issue of racism is clearly a live one, but it is all too easy to end up with a less than useful guilt-fest, exposing authentic and imagined guilt.

In fact I both enjoyed and, I believe, benefited from this course, given a light touch but in no way superficially treated by Bev Thomas. What did I learn? Probably the most valuable outcome for me was finding a few new ways into understanding the issues from a more rounded perspective than I have had access to before.

One piece of that was the well-known-to-many-but-not-me "Blue eyes/brown eyes" exercise. If you know it, read on. If not, grab this link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

Next came Godly Play, looking at and working with a specific system of religious education - OK, that makes it sound deadly, which it wasn't - and introducing the topic of spiritual development in children. This topic seems to stir up strong feelings one way or another, although because the term sounds rather generic it's hard to know how directly people have experienced what we saw, which was an environment, methods and resources (related to the Montessori tradition), not simply a way of telling stories.

We were led by Rebecca Nye, an academic turned practitioner who first brought Godly Play here, and had a great time, mostly at floor level getting a child's eye view of the process.

I could go on, but I'm more inclined to direct you to the Godly Play UK website, and do a little more reading and reflecting myself. I will say that I was impressed by what I saw, and the approach made sense of some of the joys and the frustrations from my own experience working with younger children in a church context.

(Oh, and frustratingly I used some response time in our complete session to start a poem on journeys, but I think I must have left it behind, bah, I need to go ahead of the admittedly weak - sorry! - 'Turkey.')

This blog also proves that my 'new' laptop seems to work. The old one has a serious problem with its screen, and it turned out that a second hand laptop was more viable than a repair. This one came via eBay, and I confess to a little nervousness, but so far so good...

The normal teaching timetable starts tomorrow, so this is the calm before the storm. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more...

Another view on the blogosphere

To communicate is to make oneself vulnerable; to communicate is to participate in humanity. The two are inseparable.

Not to communicate is to protect oneself from risk; not to communicate is to deny the value of humanity. These two are equivalent.

Most of us are called to be communicators: to share the word; to share the Word; to be relay stations on the Eternet so that the Blogos can be made known.

Hmmm. On reflection that was ghastly on so many levels. But maybe that’s the point too. So I choose not to unsay (delete) it. (How would you know what else I am not saying?)

Speaking as a priest in embryo, I believe that communication is one of the foundational challenges I will meet when I (trust that I will) become a priest in fact. And the heart of that challenge is expressed by this question:

How can I hear what those in my care want to say to God?

It’s true, too, that I will need to communicate with all sorts of people at all sorts of times – some published in the church calendar, others in the diary. I hope very much to become good enough at that, and I trust to the God who uses shattered cases to hold his greatest treasures to overcome both my confidences and my weaknesses and speak through me.

But that is the lesser challenge.

A blog is a dialogue. Always. Even if the only person who sees it is its author. And whatever it happens to be called: most aren’t called blogs, they often don’t have names but they are born, grow and die in places like bebo, facebook, faceparty, flickr, myspace, youtube. Wherever they are, these meeting places, they inhabit a dangerous space. By definition, and also in fact.

My own view is that virtually everyone in ministry should choose to participate in this zone of democratised communication, primarily because of the challenge I mentioned above. To hear people, go somewhere where people talk, and be willing to talk yourself. I hold this view very strongly indeed, and I would love to discuss it with you. Online, for preference.

A view I hold nearly as strongly is that those in training for ministry should become familiar with this zone too, so that it’s a natural step once on the ‘outside’ and separated from some of the support available in the learning environment.

Now, that was a whole lot of ‘I,’ wasn’t it?

It lacked evidence (I was tempted to include some of the intriguing information on the demographics of democratised communication, but decided it didn’t warrant the time ;) ).

It may have lacked objectivity (maybe I should have mentioned that I worked more often in this area than any other in my final year before coming here, so that you would have understood that my subjectivity is at least a highly socialised and debated subjectivity).

Most definitely, it did lack your input. Are you interested in engaging in discussion on this?

Jeremy

Subscribing to this blog - another voice :)

Dave Walker does a better job of explaining 'feeds'

http://www.cartoonchurch.com/blog/2006/01/19/what-is-that-funny-orange-box-over-on-the-right-there/

Subscribing to this blog

I'm asked how to get to see the blog without having to visit it too much.

Well! How rude! It's as if people had better things to do!

There are probably lots of ways to do this. Here are the ones I know.

First, when you're on the home page http://blog.parsonses.co.uk/ you may see a symbol light up above the page (I'll paste in a picture later). This shows that your computer has understood the blog as a 'feed.' Actually you may have several of these! Browse them.

One of them is on your Windows Live toolbar if you have one. You could click on the little arrow to the right of the symbol and 'subscribe' - then you can visit this and any other feeds (like news and weather) any time you like via http://www.live.com/

The standard one on the bottom row of buttons may also be configured to do this, or just to store the links for quick access.

My preference is having my own custom pages at iGoogle which gets me all I want. Get a google account if you need one (they're free) and log in to that page. You should see at the top, "Add stuff."

So click on that and all sorts of generally popular stuff will pop up. Top right, next to the search box, there's, "Add by URL." Click on that. And a little box will appear.

Paste in to this: http://blog.parsonses.co.uk/feeds/posts/default and click "Add." Now click on "Back to Homepage." Voila! You can click the little arrow to choose how many posts you want to see.

Good luck!

Nerd Notes

Essential tools - well, I haven't started yet, but I hope they'll come in useful:

1. A Windows Mobile - synchronises contacts, diary etc with my PC
2. Facade from SBSH for the above - makes it more useable
3. BibleReader for the above (with, at the moment, the NRSV text) from Olivetree

I just have to make sure I don't lose my mobile. (By the way, apparently reception is lousy in college, so the one thing I probably won't use it for is making calls ;) )