Note: Until the winner of the Logo design challenge is announced, I’m just using the logo above for now. Thanks! 
As you know, the Local Guides program is now 10 years old, which is a fantastic milestone! The Local Guides team recently announced a quiz challenge as well as hints of more to come and now, us Connect Moderators are delighted to share our proposal for 12 months of glorious celebrations!
The Idea
Let’s make 2025 a year to remember as befitting of the 10th Anniversary! This community is already great but let’s put some focus and extra effort into our activities and events to make them super awesome!
The idea is to have a theme to celebrate each month. Of course, these themes and any other special occasions can be celebrated any time of the year but each month, let’s give just that extra bit of community power to these themes!
Connect Moderators will be organising some events/activities to match the themes but we want you, the community, to also get involved. You can reach out to the Connect Moderators to see what you can help out with and/or you can also group up with your friends here on Connect to come up with new events/activities!
The Themes
| Month | Theme | Point of Contact |
|---|---|---|
| Jan | 10th Anniversary of the Local Guides program | @NareshDarji |
| Feb | 20th Anniversary of Google Maps | @JanVanHaver |
| Mar | Road editing with TRAC | @SholaIB |
| Apr | #LocalGuidesCleanTheWorld | @ErmesT |
| May | One Accessibility | @EmekaUlor |
| Jun | Meet-ups | @JaneBurunina |
| Jul | Leaderboard with Top100 Connect’s 9th Birthday |
@AdamGT @KashifMisidia |
| Aug | Photography | @FalguniP |
| Sep | Reviews | @AdrianLunsong |
| Oct | Videography | @SP31 |
| Nov | Community | TBD |
| Dec | Community | TBD |
Although it’s a bigger group effort, I’ve allocated one Point of Contact per theme to make it easier to know who to speak to so please tag both the relevant Point of Contact and myself when discussing specific themes.
We can’t predict the future, so we may tweak the title of some themes to make them more marketing friendly but the overall theme will remain the same. Also, we may switch the Point of Contact if something comes up to block the availability of the person allocated now.
We’re also collaborating with the Local Guides team to make sure that these celebrations work well with their plans!
Most of the themes are self explanatory as they are based on contributions that we do as Local Guides on Google Maps. Here are some further notes to help you with a few of the themes.
Road Editing with TRAC - This project encourages participants to help add/edit roads on Google Maps. The organisers usually do a challenge with a set target to achieve! It’s fun and there’s a leaderboard to keep track of progress! You can read the intro post here.
#LocalGuidesCleanTheWorld - For those who have been on Connect for a while, you should be aware of this project. It is based on environmentalism and centred on Earth Day. Events are usually in-person with the goal of helping to clean a specific location! But there are also lots of virtual sessions to help share and support efforts throughout the world!
One Accessibility - The focus of this project is on accessibility! There are webinars, talks, interviews and discussions that you can join in to learn more about what accessibility means to a society and the vital importance of including it in your contributions!
Leaderboard with Top100 - You should all be familiar with this project too! It’s adding an extra layer of friendly competition to our contributions with lots of different leaderboards based on different criteria such as number of views, star photos, by country etc. You can check out the latest post here.
Community - November and December will be two special months focused on us, the community! The idea is that each week, we will focus on specific communities e.g. Local Guides from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc. These communities will have one week to host activities/events and promote their communities to the rest of Connect! We’ll try our best to make sure that both large and small communities are given spots! We want interested communities who want to participate to reach out to us!
How To Participate
The point of this post is to give the community a heads-up on the plans and themes so that we can start working amongst ourselves to brainstorm for events/activities to match the themes.
Remember Community Live 2020? That was a huge event by us for us. And I’m sure we can achieve something similar… oh, just across 12 months!
Some ideas for events/activities:
- community challenges e.g. designing a logo, quiz, surveys
- posts e.g. how-tos, best practices
- meet-ups e.g. panel discussions, interviews
- social e.g. games, parties, meals
Plan well and plan ahead! Some activities will require advanced notice. For example, if you want to host a design challenge in time for the Videography theme in October, you should publish the challenge a few weeks before in September/August so that your winning design is ready for use in October.
And a reminder, please do tag the Point of Contacts and myself to let us know of your plans! On the first of each month, we should have a post ready to welcome you to each theme with a list of events/activities planned out. And we will need coordination to make sure all those events/activities are nicely spaced out across the month!
Summary
This is a grand project with a monumental scope to maintain a level of excitement and buzz throughout the year! It’s certainly very ambitious and we are confident that the community can pull this off!
We are also reaching the end of January so, if you haven’t already, please do check out this call for meet-ups by @NareshDarji for January and February, and we also have the logo and t-shirt design challenges that will end on 31 January!
Plus, February is just around the corner and the theme is to celebrate Google Maps’ 20th Anniversary! Tag @JanVanHaver (and myself) to share what you plan to do!
As the winning design for the 10th Anniversary logo won’t be announced until sometime in February, feel free to use this logo to mark your posts/events as part of the celebrations.
Let’s build on the introduction of the new Connect and make 2025 a year where the community can look back on with pride!
Let’s grow the community: invite old and new Local Guides to Connect! We can make Connect an exciting place for Local Guides to come and share their passion with each other, and build tremendous friendships! Use social media to help advertise the program and this online forum to as many people as possible! 
Feel free to share your feedback, ideas, suggestions, thoughts in the comments section below. Advertise your availability to volunteer your time and skills. Reach out to each other, brainstorm and plan out how we can achieve this!
#letsguide #10YearsOfLocalGuides
10th Local Guides and 20th Maps