September 9, 2023 was a specially wonderful day for me, as I had a chance to host the 217th meetup for Bangladesh Local Guides, “ Connecting with Connect: A Meetup for Bangladesh Local Guides”.
Thank you everyone who attended the meetup from several parts of Bangladesh, and also being physically present at the venue. It was an honor for me indeed. We were happy to have one of our members virtually in the meetup all the way from Saudi Arabia. We had a great turnout, and I’m glad that we were able to discuss some important topics, apart from mingling with all of you virtually. There were a total number of 50 Local Guides participants at the meetup, including online participants.
We hosted the meetup at the BASIS Auditorium. BASIS is the short form for Bangladesh Association of Software and Information Services. They are the national trade body for the Software & IT Enabled Service (ITES) industry in Bangladesh. It was established in 1998 with a vision to develop a vibrant software and IT service industry in the country and has been successfully working since then. The Secretary of BASIS, Mr. Hashim Ahmed was also with us as a special guest and shared his knowledge and thoughts about the Local Guides program with us. It was an honor to have him with us for the meetup, despite his busy schedule.
As planned, we started our meetup at 6 PM (BST) / 7 AM (CDT). Local Guide @zoburaz conducted the session from Dhaka.
After the introduction session, Mr. Ahmed, BASIS Secretary, shared a few words with us. He expressed his amazement about our activities, how we are contributing to Maps constantly and voluntarily. He said, “We use Google Maps all the time, to see the directions, or explore a place or to know recommendations. But we never realized who’s working behind all these.” He appreciated our efforts as Local Guides.
As a gesture of our gratitude, we presented a token gift from Bangladesh Local Guides to Mr. Ahmed. He was happy to wear the pin.
After Mr. Ahmed’s speech, we started our meetup agenda.
Here are the key takeaways from the meetup:
- For our special guest, we briefly talked about Connect. We explained to him what Connect is and how Local Guides from all over the world are being benefited from this forum and how we share our experience, problems and knowledge about Google Maps through Connect.
- We appreciated and encouraged the Bangladesh Local Guides members for their contribution on Connect, to promote Bangladesh and tourism. For their posts on Connect, the world knows about a lot of hidden gems of Bangladesh and its culture.
- We talked about the latest updates and features on Google Maps.
- Bangladesh Local Guides will turn 10 in 2024. We discussed a little about the celebration. There was not any plan discussed though as to what we were going to do to mark this milestone. We kept that topic to be discussed for a later meetup session.
There was a photo session for the in-person attendees.
We, the online attendees also took our turn.
After the photo session there was a question/ answer session where we answered some questions from different Local Guides. Some of them had asked about Connect, whereas some asked about the points on Maps. I tried to answer them accordingly from my knowledge and experience.
There was some refreshment and snacks for the in-person attendees.
The meetup was for over an hour. We concluded the session at around 7.30 AM (CDT). Overall it was a wonderful and interactive session. I would like to extend my gratitude to @MahabubMunna @zoburaz @AbdusSattar and others who worked in the background to support me in organizing this meetup and made it a huge success.
Thank you all the participants, once again for attending the meetup. I look forward to seeing you all in-person in the near future!
Disclaimer: All the pictures shared here were taken by Bangladesh Local Guides members who attended the meetup and me. All the pictures were used with due permission from the owners.
I feel very lucky to be able to participate in such a beautiful meetup .
