SciBarCamp preparation in full swing for this week’s meeting

One of the things keeping me up at night is of course SciBarCamp. It’s this week. The six organizers have never been in the same room together yet, so we’re doing a lot of SciBarCamp preparation by e-mail. The closest we got to a physical meeting is when I crammed a few people in my tiny apartment last week and connected to two others by conference call.

I have little post-its everywhere that say “buy labels”, “Fri: tape, string, pens, scissors”, and reminders to email various people. I also used up several pages in a notebook for SciBarCamp preparation. It’s all coming together, and within one afternoon I was able to cross off half of the things on my “worry list” yesterday, but that doesn’t mean they’re done, that just means I’m not worrying about them anymore (because I know how we’re going to get it done). If I add up the money we’ve been promised by sponsors and add up the costs of what we promised to pay, it almost matches, but we haven’t received or paid any actual money yet. The participant list is almost full, but of course it’s still actually possible that nobody shows up. We have a schedule with time slots and rooms, but the schedule is not going to be filled with topics until Friday night – that’s the whole point of the event. What if nobody proposes anything? Or, worse, what if there are too many sessions for the amount of time we have and we need to cut something? What if all of a sudden all these people have an emergency this weekend and can’t come?

So, you see, I won’t know if it’s all working out until the actual event is over. Hopefully it will have gone well!