Nonprofit Takes Note of Charity Tech Failures to Aid Future Efforts

A New York nonprofit network that promotes using technology to help the world’s poor has taken to lightheartedly highlighting the failure of some such efforts as a way to weed out worst practices, The New York Times writes.

MobileActive, in New York, hosts a recurring series of “FailFaire” parties during which participants hear tales of philanthropic failures resulting from “taking technology embedded with our values and our culture and embedding it in the developing world, which has very different values and cultures,” as a World Bank specialist said at a recent event.

MobileActive members say examining and learning from such mistakes can prevent others from making them. Its parties feature an award for the worst failures, called the OLPC, after the One Laptop Per Child campaign, which MobileActive views as emblematic of failed technology-based philanthropy.

One Laptop Per Child was recently laid off some staff members after falling far short of its goal of providing inexpensive laptop computers to tens of millions of children in the developing world.

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