At approximately 10:15 this morning, I received an email from Jamie Henn, our Communications Director, in my inbox. It was in Spanish. Then I received another one. It was in Portuguese. As one of our resident tech-geeks, I immediately realized that something had gone wrong. I'm not on our Spanish or Portuguese lists, and when I checked with our other team members, I could feel my heart pounding harder and harder. It was every online organizer's nightmare: our email system had sent the Spanish and Portuguese emails to everybody on our list!

We had a quick skype conversation with our team members in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Washington DC, New York and Barcelona, and decided a quick apology would be the best way to handle it. We were already receiving emails from supporters wondering if we'd been hacked, or asking why we had decided to join the shadowy world of evil spammers.

We put together a short apology, added a few pictures from Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries, crossed our fingers and sent it out. We weren't prepared for what happened next.

Instead of a rash of angry emails pointing out how unprofessional or technologically impotent we were, we immediately started receiving hundreds messages like this one:

"…as a matter of fact, i welcomed both emails – they each provided me with an opportunity to practice my language skills…"

And this one, from a teacher:

"Thank you for providing a Spanish version for my Spanish class.  The glitch is a blessing in disguise.  Can you keep me on the Spanish list?  Gracias, y sigo adelante con 350!"

The most exciting messages for me were the ones like this one:

"Glad to know you are reaching people world wide in their own languages – I love the diversity! Hurrah, and thanks."

As it turns out, many of the people on our English email list didn't know that we send emails and communicate with organizers regularly in dozens of languages. It's an amazing moment for our team when we get to share the global movement with people who don't spend time talking to organizers in Brazil or Argentina, China or Turkey, and it's incredibly satisfying to know that we are all in this together — that even if we make a mistake, we can turn it into an opportunity.

I want to share one final quote that points to the level of commitment our movement has to spreading the word.

"The translations came at the perfect moment. I was alerting friends in seven countries (Sweden, Belgium, Germany, Jamaica, Bhutan, Brazil and Argentina) and so was able to send a translated version to friends in Argentina and Brazil.  Your mistake was perfect."