When local guides get together in person, creativity erupts. At least that is definitely my experience. During ConnectLive 2019, I came up with the idea for the Local Guides Clean The Map (#LGCTM) campaign, and a couple of months ago, during EuroMeetup 2023 in Munich, something similar happened: all of a sudden an idea for the local guides community popped into my head: “Explore the Globe” meetups.
The concept is quite simply: in a 1 hour virtual meetup we collectively explore the globe by having 5-minute slots from local guides from across the globe who are taking part in the meetup on their smartphone from a location of their choice where they can tell something interesting about. My suggestion is to keep the slots per person really short (5 minutes) in order to avoid having to prepare too much - just tell in 1 or 2 minutes what is special about the place and allow brief interactions/questions from the other meetup participants.
Do you like this idea? Would you like to have a slot in the very first one? Then just fill out this form - depending on the number of submissions and the time zones I will then try to come up with a proposed time & day…
I love this idea @JanVanHaver and would love to join and show other Local Guides my local area and how it shows the rest of Australia and the world that we are an inclusive place to live in.
Great idea @JanVanHaver !! I tried to do something similar with the Manchester Local Guides where we would do a virtual tour of Manchester by stationing 2-3 Local Guides around the city. Once one Local Guide has done a ‘presentation’ at his/her location, the tour would then switch to the next Local Guide and while that presentation is going on, the first Local Guide would move on to a new location to prepare for the next ‘presentation’. So, the process just repeats for a while until the whole tour is done. We didn’t have enough Local Guides to cover all the places in Manchester… hence the idea of moving around… but as you can imagine, it would be quite chaotic and tiring! Yours is a much simpler and better idea and should be easily repeatable too!
I’ll sign up but I’m also about to shift over to Malaysia for about 3 months… so will see how I can work with time zones etc. Plus, I know next to nothing about the local places in Kuala Lumpur beyond pointing and going oooh and ahhh!
@JanVanHaver do you have approx date on when you want to do this? I have a few travels coming up in the next few weeks, so my location and time zone might change depending where I am. Trying to fill in the form and not sure what to put in haha.
@iyudhi the timing will depend on how quickly submissions are entered - right now there are 5, and I want to start the scheduling when there are at least 8. My best guess right now: somewhere in September.
Most likley not mid October, as I already have other plans then
Submissions are flowing in nicely - but probably we will need to split it up in 2 sessions, as the time zones submitted are quite far apart (16 hours between @iyudhi and @AdrianLunsong )
@JanVanHaver If I’m the anomaly feel free to scratch me out. I can still attend as a viewer. Like I mentioned before, depending when you’ll do it, I may or may not be in town, so I might be in a completely different time zone. Don’t want to hold anyone back just to accommodate my time zone.
@ShailendraOjha would you be able to join the meetup if it would be held on Saturday 23rd of September, between 5:30 and 6:30PM New Delhi time? That seems to be the timeslot that almost all other participants are able to join.
