Today is the International Day of Failure, a day when people think about, share with others about, and learn from their failures.
In the spirit of celebrating the lessons learned by the conservation tech community from facing failures and challenges, we're proud to mark the International Day of Failure with the launch of our first WILDLABS Editorial Series: Technical Difficulties.
Throughout this interconnected series, we'll discuss the value of encountering challenges and failures in our work. And as we uncover that value, we'll also discuss how failures in conservation tech can lead to successes, solutions, and reasons to be hopeful about conservation's future.
Shared over the coming months through a new article each Wednesday, Technical Difficulties will explore experiences like baboons and elephants breaking tech gear, pangolins evading camera trap surveys, wildlife falling victim to poachers or becoming fishing vessel bycatch in spite of tracking efforts, setbacks in project and tool development leading to new connections, and much more.
We hope you enjoy this new series and find worthwhile lessons to apply to your own work. And just as importantly, we hope that sharing the value of our failures will become an important part of the conservation tech community, opening new avenues for us to learn from each other, collaborate, and find solutions together.
Below, you'll find each new Technical Difficulties case study as it becomes available every week, along with a downloadable PDF. At the conclusion of the series, you'll be able to download the Technical Difficulties series in one convenient collection.
EXPLORE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES
October 13: Understanding the Realities | Colby Loucks and Eric Becker
October 20: Cleared for Takeoff | Colby Loucks and Eric Becker
October 27: Expect the Unexpected | Colby Loucks and Eric Becker
November 3: The Death of Giants | Christie Sampson
November 10: Pangolin in a Haystack| Juliana Masseloux
November 17: Tracking Thunderbird | Ellie Warren
November 24: What’s The Worst That Can Happen? | David Savage
December 1: The Promise and Pitfalls of Machine Learning for Conservation | Ellie Warren and Sara Beery
December 1: A Deployment Checklist | Alina Peter and Kristen Snyder
December 8: The Path to Success | Gautam Shah
December 15: Can You Hear Me Now? | Gayle Pedersen
December 22: Lessons from the Field of App Development | John Cornell and Ellie Warren
The full Technical Difficulties series is now available to download as a collection.
This Editorial Series would not have been possible without the generous support of the Walton Family Foundation and WCS.
Stay tuned to WILDLABS for more on the Technical Difficulties series, including future events with our contributors.
Header image: Sara Beery: 'Plan for losses, and how you will handle them (currently sorting through broken cameras using my best forensics to determine what killed them. Crushed = elephants'
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