One of the hardest things you have to do sometimes is reflect on projects which fail for whatever reason. For me, the key one is just occasionally, an idea comes along and I cannot give it the time it requires to make it work. We have only got a limited amount of time, it seems.
For me, the one that I really regret was the NowILiveHere.com idea. I’ve completely abandoned it for now because with the benefit of hindsight, the idea was nice, but making it happen turned out to be difficult in light of the amount of time I had to devote to it.
The idea was simple enough. NowILiveHere.com was to be a directory of all the activities you could get up to no matter where in Ireland you lived. The key objective of it was to make it community content driven – that meant people could sign up and plot their town and their local clubs and activities on it – so that if A N Stranger arrived in the town, family in tow, for a new exciting job and start in their lives, they had somewhere to look other than the local newspaper to find out about things that they could get involved in.
I believed this mattered because on the surface, most of Ireland appears to have GAA and the odd football team. I am willing to bet, however, that the top rugby players in small towns in Cork are completely unaware that the North Cork Lacemaking Guild is one of the best in Europe if not the world, or where the local judo club meets.
Part of this is rooted in my own youth. When I was a teenager, the choice of activities seemed to be limited to some of the more obvious (GAA) sports. I was fortunate that my parents were good enough to get me to a swimming pool every Sunday morning during the winter because I had zero interest in the local camogie club. Part of this is also rooted in a conviction I have that very often, things are going on that we just don’t know about. Things like knitting clubs, volunteer organisations building things. The media would have you believe that all the weekend is about is partying and sleeping in on Sunday morning. But I pass through towns, small towns, and realise that they have karate clubs, yoga classes and I thought that a central site where you could just go “okay, I’m living in Portlaois for the next year or so, what’s going on there?” rather than spend weeks asking at libraries, looking at notices in supermarkets.
When I built it – and I built it twice – I set it up on Mediawiki because it struck me as possibly the handiest CMS for a project like that. I had grand plans involving linking into Google maps as well. Typically, however, on both occasions, it got heavily attacked by spam and I didn’t have the time to do any of the wider customisation and development I had in mind for it. Sometimes, the tools we give something are just the wrong fit.
I’ve been thinking about the whole idea again lately and am still tempted to try and figure out a way of making it happen. I might not necessarily go with Mediawiki – having looked at that again lately for other reasons, I’ve concluded that it doesn’t fit the needs of that project any more; that in fact, building something straight onto a Google or Bing map might even be a better fit altogether rather than trying to build anything more elaborate.
I’m still interested in making it community driven; I look at how boards.ie has developed into something highly useful (although occasionally monumentally diversionary) for a lot of people, particularly in specialist areas (I have an interest in the photography and commuting and transport fora there). It’s just, something like that can be hugely open to abuse, and the question is how you go about policing it. On the flipside, I really have no idea what people do in their spare time in the way of clubs and societies and classes in every town in Ireland. I need to crowdsource that information.
On balance, though, it matters that people who have ideas look at trying to implement them, and learning from the failure.