[RECAP]: Celebrate 2021 Share Your 2022 Local Guides Goals Meet-up

[KarenVChin]

Happy 2022 Local Guides!

The day before New Year’s Eve, 40+ Local Guides from around the world joined USA and Italy Local Guides Connect Moderators and 2021 Local Guides Guiding Stars @KarenVChin and @ermest for a 90-minute virtual Celebrate 2021 Share Your 2022 Local Guides Goals Meet-up.

Ermes and I were ecstatic to see long-time and new Local Guides friends during our 2nd annual year-end global Local Guides Community Celebration. After another year of the Pandemic, it was lovely to spend time with long-time supportive Local Guides friends such as highly active Connect members (Rosy, Shrut, Alexandre, Yannick, Martinha, and Amir), 8 Connect Moderators (Sonia, Jane, Steve, Kashif, Ricardo, Feliciana, Isha, and Indah), Local Guides Summit 2016 (Dr. Shaunak) and Local Guides Summit 2017 (Dr. Shaunak again) and Connect Live 2018 (Khamphout, Davide, Maria, and Gabu) and Connect Live 2019 (Karol, Maria again) alumni, and 2020 Guiding Star (Ravindu. Karol, Feliciana, Rosy, Ricardo, Doc Dells, and Indah again) and 2021 Guiding Stars (Erna, Jay, Anshuk, Rebeca, Kamal, and Zino).

If you could not join us or want to relive our time together, here is the Celebrate 2021 Share Your 2022 Local Guides Goals Meet-up deck.

Ermes and I appreciate you completing our long Meet-up Invite Survey form and for those who submitted us Local Guides and Google Maps questions to answer. We hope we have answered your questions thoroughly.

Special Meet-up Moments

We hope you had as much fun as we did! These 3 group selfie poses reflect the fun we had together.

Your “Silliest” pose

Your “Best Dance” pose

Your “Best Smile”

Are you up for the #2022LocalGuidesGoals Challenge?

At the end of our presentation, I challenged our attendees to post their 2022 Local Guides Goals on Connect and tag Ermes and me.

We hope to see many of your #2022LocalGuidesGoals posts here on Local Guides Connect!

Special Thank You

Ermes and I want to thank Australia Local Guide @MariaNgo and Indonesia, now New Zealand, Local Guide and Connect Moderator @indahnuria for staying up or waking up to attend this meet-up. Maria, we are deeply honored that you stayed awake at 2 AM Melbourne Time and Indah that you woke up at 5 AM Wellington Time for us! We felt your love fromOceania.

Our Local Guides Meet-up Plans for 2022

As we stated during our 2022 Local Guides portion of our presentation, Ermes and I plan to have monthly virtual Local Guides (with a sprinkling of Google Crowdsource) meet-ups this year. We have been working on a list of Local Guides and Google Maps topics that we hope you find interesting and be willing to join us. If you are not already on our meet-up invite email mailing list, please comment below or DM us here on Connect.

Thanks again for supporting us! You don’t know how much we greatly appreciate and feel blessed to have you as part of our global Local Guides Community.

Big hugs and kisses from the US and Italy!

Karen & Ermes

[Sagir]

I missed this one. @KarenVChin and @ErmesT another successful year end party.

I can you had fun.

Thanks for the recap…

Happy New year

[KarenVChin]

Happy 2022 @Sagir @and your beautiful family!

No worries! Participating in “real life,” especially this time of year is more important than a virtual Local Guides meet-up. @ErmesT and I know you were with us in spirit on Thursday.

Cheers,

Karen

[doc_dells]

Happy New Year

Thanks for sharing the recap @KarenVChin it was a great meet-up hosted by the dynamic duo with @ErmesT Where comprehensively covered topics about local guides and Google maps through an interactive approach. I really enjoyed it especially meet with awesome local guides around the world and some familiar faces .

I like the all unique photos ideas

My 2022 local guides goals:

• ACCESSIBILITY : Improve my contribution, through providing complete information about accessibility on google maps when conducting a review
• CONNECT: Post one article per month (this is the 2021 target too, but it hasn’t been achieved yet )
• MEET-UP: organize more meet-up which collaborate with other local guides, also face-to-face meet-up whenever possible
• PERSONAL: stay healthy, stay happy, more travelling and move to level 9

[Tejal]

@KarenVChin and @ErmesT

It was wonderful session and wish to join with again for getting more knowledge from you all. My pledge for 2022 is contribute for environment and reduce plastic.

Regards Tejal

[MariaNgo]

Thank you @KarenVChin and @ErmesT for organising this meetup with thought provoking questions. It’s good to have such prompts annually I think to do some goal setting. Keep up the good work.

[Utmanzval]

Dear @KarenVChin & @ermest Thank you very much for providing us the opportunity to interact with local guides virtually across the Globe. I am sure everyone enjoyed the moments and we are expecting this type of leading role in the future which is helping us to know about each other and to know how to achieve goals. It was an amazing evening for me and I will try my best to join all your upcoming meetups which will help me to learn how to lead the meetups in future.

Best wishes from Islamabad and I invite everyone to visit our beautiful country to witness the beauty here.

[Velvel]

Great and complete recap as always

Thanks a lot for hosting this meet-up to end 2021, our super duo @KarenVChin @ErmesT

Hearing what you both shared felt like seeing the result of the official Local Guides’ survey and vote. Kudos for what you’ve done and also for the continuous motivation to both of the old and new Local Guides all around the world.

[system]

Glad to know this ! My journey as a local guide is awesome till now. Google local guides gave me a platform to help and serve my neighborhood , state, country and the whole world.

I started posting on Google maps from April 2021. As i came to know about this local guide program. My ultimate goal was to complete level 7 till the end of 2021. And guess what, i achieved my goal. And i felt very happy when I completed level 7 as a local guide on Dec 31st 2021. It was like a milestone achieved. My happiness was doubled when I received an email from Google Maps which went like this : “Abrar, you’re now a level 8 local guide. Congratulations you have reached level 8 and there’s no stopping for you!!”

So now I am a level 8 local guide.

And my ultimate goal for 2022 is to support small businesses and also contribute on Google maps and local guides connect as much as I can.

My dream is to become Google local guides representative for my country India. And i hope I’ll achieve it one day for sure!!

[MarkAuchincloss]

Thanks so much @KarenVChin & @ErmesT for helping me to attend my first Meet-up and to everyone including those who took the time to chat a bit. It was highly informative in terms of what we should be focusing on,how we can develop our inputs and in setting our future goals.

My #2022LocalGuidesGoals :

1. Contribute every week to Maps.

2. Continue to add content to Maps and get to 250,000 points (from 210,000)

3. Attend 3 Meet-ups.

4. Write a Connect Post.

5. Become a Guiding Star.

As regards to future topics for discussion I would like to ask about out Published Lists and how we can make the most of the information they contain. I’ve no idea how my public lists are performing. When I look at them it doesn’t tell me if they have had any visits. I know I can increase exposure by sharing them in for example in my Social Media but are there is there anything else I should be doing to promote them? I have created some incredibly useful Lists on pilgrimage routes, ice cream parlours, wineries etc that deserve to be utilised by a wider audience but I’m not sure how I can reach out. Can Google make the list feature more prominent too so people search them more?

Wishing everyone a happy and healthy 2022.

[KhamphoutS]

Great to met you all and I can feeling the energy, passion and love from you @KarenVChin @ErmesT

Keep it up and inspiring for all #LocalGuides out there!

Much love from Laos

[KashifMisidia]

As usual, an amazing event it was. I would like to wish everyone Happy New year, and many many congratulations to @KarenVChin and @ErmesT for arranging and hosting such a wonderful meet-up for Local Guides, where we all enjoyed and share many things together regarding our goals for 2022.

[OSAMA1]

I am like the same when I started to maps contribution . Nothing changed me even Pandemic. I kept publishing my blue lines and street view shooting in my Amman Capital . I kept uploading a hundreds of 360 photos to a different spots here . I will continue as like last 2021 years and more .

@KarenVChin

@ErmesT

Oh , I am not mentioned here even don’t see my photo in the screenshot !!!

Respectfully

[AdamGT]

Hey @KarenVChin and @ErmesT

I would have loved to attend your party and although I would have preferred a better compromised northern and southern hemisphere time, ordinarily I probably could have made it even though it was 2am However, I have overseas family visiting at the moment and it was just not possible for me to participate. I’m glad to see from your post that it was a huge success.

Happy New Year to all

[RosyKohli]

@KarenVChin

Awesome, meet up this 2 nd time I have attended your meet up. It encourage us, motivate us. Last year 2021 was active took few meet up, & I got level 8 then suddenly went low was not not active on connect. But now again got charge up got active , will try best to be active every month in a day give at least 1-2 hour for my self in that spend time on connect, edit & post on google maps. With God grace reach next level.

Thanks to you & @ErmesT .

[ErmesT]

It is true, @OSAMA_1 , and indeed you are an active Connect member. Unfortunately we missed you in the list because, as you said, you are not in the screenshot, but I know very well that you was there most of the time during the meet-up, even if not when we took the selfies (lost connection?)

Here above the screenshot with the largest number of people taken during the “selfie time”.

As you can see, my settings are for 49 people, so I can ensure you that everyone in the call when I took the screenshot was visible

[ErmesT]

Thank you everyone for joining, and of course thanks to my partner in crime @KarenVChin for taking time to write this amazing recap.

Sorry everyone for being so late in responding. I wanted to take a few days OFF, traveling around for relaxing, taking photos and to collect materials for future posts.

For many the winter holidays will end tomorrow, from Monday I will certainly be more active

It was amazing to see you all in the meet-up. I wasn’t expecting so many (and so interesting) questions. We tried to respond to all of them, but if you think that we missed something, or if you wants some more detail about our replies, feel free to ask here, and we will do our best to answer