2016: a year of failures

I will personally remember 2016 as a year of failures.

I failed to move to work for the Civil Service. After that now world-famous-experience™ in 2015 (ask me), I went through a couple of recruitment procedures for positions at which I thought I would be great; I was long-listed for one, and did not hear from the other.

The charity of which I was a trustee and in which I really believed as a vehicle of social change failed to keep raising funds and had to be liquidated (which is in itself an incredibly emotionally stressful and time-consuming experience).

On a busy Saturday evening, I failed to lock a window while having a quick pint with friends at the local pub. When I was back 45 minutes later, a burglar had took my camera.

Brexit happened. It didn’t just happen: it was a failure of my own folk; liberal, educated, multi-cultural people who utterly failed to engage with whoever is not a member of their own circle and often could only react with disgust at their opposite — but legitimate — views; a collective failure which was a personal failure.

Trump happened. People like me failed to convince the others. I keep realising how blind we were every time I meet relatives with whom I used to discuss politics — now members of several “everything but Clinton” conspiracies. I failed to engage with them, to understand their worries.

After two months working on a side project, I failed to notice I was saving it in the /Downloads folder, rather than my usual — and automatically backed up in four different computers — /DEV. I deleted it, with no backup available.

I failed to say good-bye to three friends who passed away in their thirties. Three inspiring, lovely, fighting individuals who have left a void I find and will always find irreplaceable. “I’ll call them another time”. “I don’t want to disturb”. “It would be awkward to just say hello”. I failed to see that sometimes you do not have that chance.

Some good things happened in 2016:

• I published my first commissioned/paid article. “The Open Data Delusion”, on Broken Toilets, was read and shared thousands of time.
• At St George’s, I worked with researchers in need of a powerful computational infrastructure. After months of arguing with senior management, researching user needs, discussing, planning, advocating, I put a bid in our capital planning round with the endorsements of over 20 senior academics. We received over £90K in funding to initiate a High Performance Computing service.
• I won the “Individual Champion” category at the Open Data Institute Awards. Just being shortlisted had been a smashing achievement, and I stood in disbelief when Sir Tim Berners-Lee called my name.
• On 30.12.2015, I started my own company to do some freelancing on the side of my 9–5 job. I have worked on a diverse range of projects, from rapid web development to research report writing, and been enjoying it a lot.
• At the Accountability Hack I did not hack anything, but really enjoyed just staying around and helping out answering Open Data queries. I had huge fun, and the Rebel Labs folks gave me a special “Community Spirit Award” for the help given. I will say something cheesy, but I was really moved to feel the love from my community of civic hacktivists :-)
• Finally, I put together 4 lines of code that are automatically tweeting the UK General Election 1997 and about 2000 people are now following it, including MPs and journalists.

I’m happy, of course — from the smallest to the biggest of these good things. Yet failure is a good reminder that success should always be put in perspective. So my failures in 2016 remind me that you can take risks, but you need to be ready to deal with consequences; that to achieve results sometimes you need to advocate, argue, bring people to your side; that the key in obtaining what you want is often the ability to build bridges across communities; being humble and seeking help when needed; being open about feeling low, rather than our constantly shiny and polished social media selves.

Failure happens, we miss opportunities, we are not good enough with people with whom we would want to be good. If this crazy 2016 has taught me anything, is to welcome failure — sometimes, it brings you back to ground level, and makes you understand how you can rebuild more solidly.

How will you be, 2017?

…and if you want, look at this talk by Paul Clarke and listen to this podcast by Anke Holst. They are two people I deeply respect, and their words at those links have been the source of some deep reflection for me during this year, so I would like to publicly thank both for that.