Concurrent Session 8: Failing Forward

Format: Failure Panel (45 min)

Speakers: Heira Hardiyanti, Iryandi Masputra, Felix Weth, Ravi S. Ghosh

“Failing Forward” brings together practitioners who reflect openly on projects that stalled, struggled, or did not unfold as planned—and on what those experiences can teach us about building cooperative and solidarity-based AI. Rather than treating failure as something to hide, the session asks what we can learn from it about founders and leadership, burnout, funding, business acumen, governance, legal and regulatory ecosystems, and the role of cooperative peak organizations—and how those lessons might inform more durable cooperative projects. These reflections are guided by three questions: What did you promise? What happened in practice? Who carried the costs?

Iryandi Masputra reflects on earlier cooperative and agrifood initiatives connected to Aqsa Farm that stalled or failed to develop as intended, examining why they faltered and what those experiences taught him. He connects these lessons to Aqsa Farm’s current effort to build community-owned agrifood systems through cooperative ownership, shared digital knowledge, and AI tools designed to strengthen small-scale farmers rather than extract from them.

Heira Hardiyanti, co-founder of MyCoolClassroom, reflects on the cooperative’s failure and what it revealed about founder dependence, organizational dynamics, weak collective governance, and the difficulty of turning members from followers into active co-owners. Her central lesson is that good intentions and a strong cooperative vision are not enough: sustainable cooperatives also need shared decision-making, accountability, succession, active member participation, and institutions that can endure beyond individual founders.

Felix Weth reflects on Fairmondo, the cooperative marketplace he co-founded, examining where its ambitions encountered practical limits and what its trajectory can teach us about scale, leadership, governance, financing, business strategy, and the broader institutional conditions required for cooperative alternatives to endure.

Ravi S. Ghosh is interested in what happens when well-intentioned efforts to build technology for collective benefit run into institutional, organizational, or policy constraints. Drawing on his work creating collaborative spaces around technology and housing, he reflects on where cooperative approaches stall, what those failures reveal about the conditions needed for collective governance, and how those lessons can inform more workable systems for AI development and adoption.

Community notes

Reporter 1: Ravi S. Ghosh
Reporter 2: Mansur Yumagulov

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