And I want to thank you for starting it, @Sra1
Taking some point from your reply to @tony_b
Every month we have here in the community a topic where the team introduce new members: Introduce Yourself — June 2026
Sometimes they joined Connect a few days/weeks before the post, sometimes they never joined us before. The team contact and interview them, and write a post. Other times they may share something on the Social Media, like they did for @MarcoDavoli , @Lukas_B , but in this case we are talking about contributors that are definitely “over the top”, with millions of points.
In several areas outstanding contributions are also shared in Google Maps, when you explore an area. Not a list of people, of course, but a list of amazing Contributions made by people.
And here is Connect, where we daily discuss about improvements and issues in the actual program.
All the above are of course ways to be invited to Connect Live, where you can meet some of the developers, and have some insight about the future of Google Maps and the Local Guides program. Of course we can’t share anything publicly about what we saw in there, but we had the possibility to see and evaluate the new features months, and sometimes years, in advance