@AdrianLunsong I like your reply alot. @FaridTDF thank you for kicking this off and thinking about the community.
Here are my 2 cents about it.
(Better put up a disclaimer here that these are all my own guesses, nothing in this post is official Google, alright?) =)
Like some others here, it was a shock coming to the Local Guides Connect (LGC) platform after we were on Google+ communities. The style, feel, type of interaction, it’s very very different. I didn’t like it at all and I still don’t feel wholly comfortable with it. But I can see the rationale, and that is what we need to review - the purpose of LGC, and the design and structure of it now.
First LG, and LGC aren’t like super big products of Google. Let’s be truthful, Maps is billion user, but LG itself not so much. Maps is a Product area that is big and important. LG is a section within Maps. Maps has the focus and need to be a standalone app, LG definitely did not start off with that amount of focus, resources and project team. I’m sure LG team has grown considerably, as LG has been fairly successful. We don’t know the internal metrics and targets but hey it’s still around and not yet deprecated like many other Google products. haha.
So this means that LG started off in a very ghetto way? Using free-to-use Google+ communities, organized by volunteer members. Other than one official community, all others were unofficial. But there was a good traction with many local communities. People joined the hundreds of unofficial communities, followed posts, commented, joined hangout calls, attended meetups. I think there were also some attempts on Facebook etc.
Then LG grew a bit bigger? G+ communities could not do so many things. No badges, no integration with LG levels, no voting, no tagging etc. Again let’s face it, G+ was a stagnant and obviously soon-to-be-deprecated side of Google. It’s now official but the writing was on the wall. LG cannot go down with G+. LG needed its own ground to live on. In came LGC.
Now LG is still not so fully staffed with so many engineers. Engineers are dedicated to Maps, mapping initiatives and developing LG functions on Maps platform. That’s the important part of LG. LGC is a side thing, and a big corporation would not and probably should not dedicate important engineering resource to developing an ancillary supporting feature. So in came a forum setup, with customization to link to our LG levels. version 1 obviously look terrible and did not have any mobile support. It was a huge pain to use. I don’t know how we stuck through that but we did. Forcing us to use it to apply for Summits was a necessary evil. haha.
Having a central LGC also meant that now we are one big LG “community” instead of disparate ones. As Adrian and Farid are pointing out, what’s happening to our community? We went from truly local and fully relevant G+ groups, of 10s to 100s to 1000s of people, to one big forum of 100,000s, to 1,000,000s of people? We won some and we lost a lot.
We now have a big group. Your posts now can be seen by the whole world. Amazing. Official Google posts and now possible to be shared together. Topics like photography, food, etc, can be shared with anyone. That’s a big plus.
We lost our local posts. Heck it’s no longer possible to keep track of what’s happening to our local friends. I want to see posts about Singapore, I can hardly do it. In LGC v1 it was kinda barely there, in LGC v2, it’s a hack to get there. People could no longer find “Singapore Local Guides” and join, people could no longer easily get updates about meetups in their city. I find that was a huge loss in that aspect.
But we need to see whether the loss is worth the gain.
Of course LGC is in V2 redesign, massively prettier, more mobile friendly, no more dumb kudos of everything, somewhat fewer spam posts. The Summit criteria has also been tweaked. in year1 and year2, engagement with LGC was paramount to growth and that’s where the focus really went. In year3, I think mapping contributions are more varied and more rewarded. Quality of posts has increased overall. Local engagement still is terrible. It’s terrible and I call it terrible.
But really, what have we gained over these initial years?
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Highly grown Local Guides Connect branding. dedicated URL, dedicated marketing area, better SEO/SEM.
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Improving global forum
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More engagement with Googlers
The design of the platform needs to fit the use case.
There are studies on how many people we can effectively interact with. It’s just restrictions on mindshare, time, attention span.
A close-friends whatsapp chat, maybe 5-10 persons would be good. Too many and it’s too distant, too impersonal, too spammy, too many pings.
A bigger interest chat/group, maybe 20-100 persons would be good? or even up to a few hundred. Enough to get sufficient attendance at gatherings, but still get to know everybody’s names. hang out nice, keep the group fun.
What if you have 1000 people? Wow that’s bigger. So you now have a more 1:1000 announcement style of events. It’s hard to talk. Can still spread information but you lose the discussion aspect. That’s why brainstorming and discussions have to work in small groups.
What if you have 1,000,000 people? Now it’s more of a forum style. You can’t have a chat group of 1,000,000 right?
LGC is the official place to bring together 1 million people. It is designed as the place to showcase, encourage and promote LG activity. So what it has done is tell people, hey this is how you should LocalGuides, by doing photography, food, meetup, etc etc, and this is how others have done it. The sections are laid out here. By cutting across countries, it is able to have all the photography together, all the food together. It is building up a shared culture of good posts because if we split into country level, there would not be sufficient content within each section. I think this is still true. The amount of good content is still not that high if we divide by 100 countries or 1000 cities.
For newbies who aren’t sure what LG is, or what to do in LG, this is a great start and landing page. I myself might not identify with all of it but I’m sure some of it interests me.
Of course this in turns, loses the local aspect quite a bit. I use a trick to search for posts mentioning Singapore, but it’s tedious. And I really don’t see many posts, maybe a small handful each week. Local engagement is low. I think this could be improved on, but maybe or maybe it isn’t time yet. We need a critical mass of central posts to keep it going, and then diversify more.
But if you think hard about it, yes Local and Personal are very very fun and exciting aspect of LG/LGC, and it’s one we enjoy so much as close friends, but is it really critical to the whole LG experience. As a LG, you start off with your own little Maps app, doing your own reviews etc. None of that requires collaboration. It’s quite a personal thing. And that is totally fine. We should recognise that there are excellent LGs out there with great reviews and photos who might not want to interact on a forum or a chatgroup. In that sense, a 1:1,000,000 forum and announcement site is important for this. They can come in, easily see how people do great reviews and photos around the world, low commitment.
Scale. chat groups and small communities need to scale to millions of users. Google needs this to scale. Scale means we community people cannot manage groups of 1000s or 100,000s of people effectively, sustainably. Small groups and close knit groups are highly seasonal, variable, susceptible to people dropping out, group dynamics, people getting along well with each other, us having the time and energy to dedicate to it. We all have our lives and work to attend to as well! So a forum is more self-sustaining in the long run and larger scale.
So how. I think LGC definitely is lacking the space and freedom for smaller groups to develop, thrive and find each other. LGs are depending on their own willpower to drive Instagram communities, facebook communities, whatsapp communities, etc. I see some people spending incredible amount of their own time, energy, and money in these events. It’s an outlier, but impressive.
Google stressed meetups for some time, but don’t really provide sufficient tools and discovery for it to grow and be successful. Hosting a gathering between people we already know, is not the same as trying to host a meetup for other people to learn what LG is. The latter depends on more public discovery that only Google has the access to. Prior Google did a fair amount of local events, which was wonderful. Then it dropped off. Now Connect Live has come to a few other countries. I am so happy about that. But it’s slow. They can’t be in every city. So Google needs to support local efforts, with tools, resources, publicity etc.
But I don’t know. A big part of LG for me is to make new friends from different countries. I won’t be so interested in going out in my own city, I find I know it quite well. So a big global LGC also does well in this for me?
Is the current LGC a community? yes but maybe not the one we expected or looking for. I think there’s space for other smaller breakaways, whether inside LGC or currently outside of it.
crece si lo regamos 
y lo cuidamos podando 
las ramas que crecen mal:leaves:, removemos la tierra 
de vez en cuando, a Connect le falta evolucionar y actualizarse a la realidad de todos los usuarios 
.