Last night at a dinner with Ivan Krstić and Itamar Shtull-Trauring , we were all lamenting that too many (all?) software conferences focus specifically on positive results. This is what you want, of course, if you treat a conference as purely a marketing venue. However, most learning takes place based on something that someone didand then needed to correct, not something that they did right.All of the great software developers I know have at least onestory of how a project they were working on was a complete disaster. Often these projects are shielded from the public eye, since nobody wants to talk about failure. So, how do we make a public discussion of these ideas socially acceptable?Thus, an idea was born: FAILcon. The idea is simple: submitted talks and papers must be related to projects which failed in an interesting way. The larger the better, of course — the bigger they are, the harder they fail — but anything that failed in an interesting way would be a valid subject for discussion.I'm writing about it so that it won't be forgotten, because I think it's a great idea. But I doubt that any of us are going to organize a conference any time soon. So please, steal this idea. Does anyone out there with conference-organizing skills want to get something together based around the common theme of failure?