I think I materially contributed to the creation of the Arbital post, by being an Arbital investor and specifically requesting one (as well as requesting the open-sourcing of the code). This may sound weird, but I think in that case “a good postmortem” is the best outcome I would feel entitled to hope for, and I was investing more with the goal of “learning what will happen if someone attempts this project” than making a monetary return.
I think it’s a real tragedy that, in probably most major project failures, the principals are too drained by the fact of the failure to pass on knowledge that would be helpful to future attempts. That feels to me like wasting the most likely potential value to have come out of a big novel project in the first place. Most truly interesting projects will fail. I think it’s good to go in hoping for success, but I also think it’s irresponsible not to have a plan for how something can be learned from failure.
So, more positively: 1000 thank-yous to Duncan for taking the time to write this up.
EDIT: Oh, I guess I got distracted and failed to include sort of the punchline here: One way to encourage this is maybe to donate resources to a project, conditional (explicitly or implicitly) on being entitled to information about what happened if it fails?
I think I materially contributed to the creation of the Arbital post, by being an Arbital investor and specifically requesting one (as well as requesting the open-sourcing of the code). This may sound weird, but I think in that case “a good postmortem” is the best outcome I would feel entitled to hope for, and I was investing more with the goal of “learning what will happen if someone attempts this project” than making a monetary return.
I think it’s a real tragedy that, in probably most major project failures, the principals are too drained by the fact of the failure to pass on knowledge that would be helpful to future attempts. That feels to me like wasting the most likely potential value to have come out of a big novel project in the first place. Most truly interesting projects will fail. I think it’s good to go in hoping for success, but I also think it’s irresponsible not to have a plan for how something can be learned from failure.
So, more positively: 1000 thank-yous to Duncan for taking the time to write this up.
EDIT: Oh, I guess I got distracted and failed to include sort of the punchline here: One way to encourage this is maybe to donate resources to a project, conditional (explicitly or implicitly) on being entitled to information about what happened if it fails?