Category: engineering

Aug 11, 2021

EWB Failure Reports

“What happens when engineers run a charity? They write detailed postmortems, of course, so they can fix their mistakes.” - apenwarr

Engineers Without Borders: Failure Reports

I find this one particularly funny.

“The election planning committee indicated that we could collect votes ahead of time, and then submit ballots during the election period. My team created a Google form clearly indicating that in completing the form, they were giving our campaign team consent to submit a vote for me on their behalf. As such, we could not only account for every supporter’s vote, but also control when it would be cast in the race. Since preliminary results were to be released each evening in the election period, our plan was to submit votes slowly at the beginning of the week so not to give away our strong position in the race. We would then work around the clock in the last 48 hours to submit the majority of my votes.

We failed to see that to someone that wasn’t in our chapter, this looked like a failing campaign that led to a desperate attempt to stuff the ballot box. Consequently and unsurprisingly, the candidate that lost by a mere 15 votes called for a recount. After a long, three-­week ordeal, the election was awarded to the latter candidate due to inconsistencies discovered with the votes I had received.

Looking back, we realized we had developed tunnel vision; we failed to be cognizant of the fact that we had to be accountable to the LYAC’s election procedures and what was expected of us. By not consulting the election planning committee about our campaign strategy, we took the committee and the runner­-up by surprise. We had lost sight of our original goal of forging meaningful connections with youth in our community behind a shortsighted, single­minded desire to win a race”

don’t know if real, but here’s the comment:

“The footnote to this interesting learning experience is that the candidate that Joyce lost to actually ended up backing out of her role due to the required time commitment. Thus, Joyce un-un-won an election, an accomplishment that may truly be first-of-its-kind.”