Wikimania:News from the Team/2015-04-01
Sleepless nights
There's a small purple notebook in my desk, with a very important purpose: every time I come across a good quote (most frequently in Wikiquote) I write it down. Then, whenever I'm feeling particularly sad or disappointed, I pick up a bit of wisdom from people I admire, people who have gone through much worse than me. Then, as the song says, I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feel so sad.
I took the picture to the right almost a year ago, uploaded it to Commons and forgot about it until yesterday. On the surface, it's just Chris, Carmen and Omar in front of their respective devices. If you check (and trust) the EXIF data, you'll see it was taken at 2AM on a Friday. Why this strange hour? Because Thursday nights were the optimal time for us to meet (along with Ivan) and we wanted to make good use of every minute we were together.
You might also wonder what's with the strange decoration. We knew how our meetings would keep us awake all night and we asked around for options. One of our volunteers graciously donated his house as our impromptu office that night so we could work during the graveyard shift. We used 24-hour diners and cafés, we used any option we could to meet and plan; and when it wasn't possible we resorted to online meetings.
Planning Wikimania has never been easy and it probably will get harder as the days go by. We have rearranged our schedules and priorities to meet in unorthodox places and times to make Wikimania possible. Wikimania has brought us many sleepless nights between two shifts of my day job and we seem to accomplish very little. In days like these, I take my purple notebook and read:
It is the greatest of mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little -- Sydney Smith
And...
People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things -- Sir Edmund Hillary