My name is Mina. I’m a 30 year old Iranian woman, these days living in Tampere, Finland. It’s been a long journey for me, I mean life. I lived in different cities, learned a lot about them and love them.
When I was a little kid, my family and I went to metropolitan of Tehran for a long stay. It was a huge city in comparison to where I was from. I was fascinated yet confused by strange neighborhoods. There was no easy way you could have learned street names and alleys, neighborhoods and highways. I was so curious about the city, so eager to know it better that in the first days of our arrival I got a booklet of 200 pages or so, Map of Great Tehran. Whenever I had time I was spending it reading map of some corner of Tehran to learn the city even for a bit.
We went back home but I loved Tehran since then. When I was about 25 I moved back to live in Tehran, my beautiful yet strange city. This time I had Google Maps as my guide. In the first couple of months I learned my neighborhood and even some closer areas. I was giving addresses to my friends who had lived in Tehran their whole life. With Google Maps I learned about every corner of the city I loved. I knew every nice cafe, restaurant, museum, etc. because of Google Maps.
In the first few years I was just using Google Maps and not improving it, one of my friends taught me how to be a little part of this great community. After that I tried to improve some details missing about my beloved city on Google maps whenever I encountered them.
Nowadays I live in Finland, in a small town of Tampere. Once again, I tried to learn about my surroundings with help of Google Maps. Now I contribute more than ever to improve Google Maps as I had realized about its beautiful power of making strange places feel like home to newcomers. Wherever I visit, I try to add as much as useful detail I think it might someday help a stranger, parking availability in local library, high chair availability in a cozy cafe, having take-away and kid foods in a restaurant, etc.
Great deal of people are afraid of future, not just because it is getting more and more unpredictable, but as there will be more and more advanced technology. To be honest I don’t fear it, I lived a life in growing of technology which I saw its effect in peoples everyday lives; it can be a beautiful one if we put effort on it.