Library conferences can be great places to pick up new ideas, with roundtables, seminars, and sessions filled with stories of successful projects from peers, vendors, and professionals from other fields. Information from these sessions can help other libraries get started on new initiatives without having to reinvent the wheel.
But all projects involve some degree of risk, and some projects can fall apart as the result of preventable problems. At the recent Code4Lib 2013 event held at the UIC Forum at University of Illinois at Chicago, a group of librarians found during their Fail4Lib pre-conference workshop that discussing failed or problematic projects can be as constructive as discussing success.