I’ve been sat staring at the screen trying to figure out how to write this recap and what/how much can I include in it! There’s so much to say and also, I have no idea on how to describe the emotions that are flowing in my head at the moment! I’ll try my best and I hope I don’t miss anything and anybody out… there’s a lot to cover!
It’s been a whirlwind of a journey since early October when I first floated the idea to the Connect Moderators and the Local Guides team and after a couple of drafts, thanks to numerous inputs especially from @KarenVChin , we ended up with the foundation of Community Live 2020. And since then everybody has been slowly adding to it their ideas and feedback and finally, come the 12th of December, Community Live 2020 took place and the rest is history! Two weeks later, here I am writing this recap!
Honestly, I cannot thank the Connect Moderators enough for all the work that they’ve put in and the support they’ve given in realising this ‘small’ project of mine! I’m glad that we got to work on this together and I think it’s also helped us to get to know each other better too! 
And a huge thank you too for the Local Guides team for giving us the green light, and supporting us as much as they could without making it ‘official’. A special mention to @Kwiksatik for letting me use her pro account on Canva which was so instrumental in helping me get all my media materials done in no time! Once again, thanks everyone!
For those who missed the event you’ll be pleased to know that the videos for all the sessions are now available on YouTube. Do note that the Social Lounge was not recorded as it was meant to be a casual space for all. Also, I will only embed the Opening and Closing Ceremony videos here. For the rest, please use the links which will open in a new tab.
I will add more links to the recap posts if and when they get posted. Also, here’s a link to the full playlist that contains all the YouTube videos.
During the Opening Ceremony, we also got to play back this special video message from the Local Guides team. I wanted to highlight it separately here because I just thought that it was really cool! And, if you didn’t know who your Google Moderators are, now you can see and hear them too!
And during the Closing Ceremony, we had one last surprise for the attendees: we hosted an Awards ceremony to highlight the amazing contributions that the community have done in the past few months! You may have come across the posts for them already but for your convenience, here are the links to the awards posts:
- [AWARDS] Community Love Challenge #CommunityLive2020
- [AWARDS] Community Food Fight Challenge #CommunityLive2020
- [AWARDS] And the #ComunityChefChallenge award goes to…
- [AWARDS] #CommunityLive2020 celebrates the Top posts of #MonthlyTopic in 2020
- [AWARDS] Local Guides Travel Quiz Winners! Who are they?.. #CommunityLive2020
- [AWARDS] Community Meet-up Challenge #CommunityLive2020 … who are your winners!?!
- [AWARDS] And your winners for #CommunityReviewChallenge are…
- [AWARDS] Our favourite photos from the #CommunityPhotoChallenge #CommunityLive2020
- [AWARDS] It’s Friday so it’s gotta be a Friday Favourites Awards post!! #CommunityLive2020
Congratulations to all the winners once again!! And for all those who participated too, a massive thanks for your support! We’ve read so many wonderful posts and found out tons of all the amazing contributions that you have done. And although we recognise the hard work done by so many Local Guides, we could only award a few of you! Do know that we think you’re all FANTASTIC too!
I also wanted to draw your attention to @Cecilita , @AlejandraMaria , @Jesi , @AlexandreCampbell and @FaridMonti who collaborated in their recap posts to write 5 separate posts that are related to their Session C1 - Finding Values. The posts are in Spanish but you can easily translate them to your own language of choice! I just thought it was such a fun way to expand/recap on their session! You can find the posts here:
- Damos la Bienvenida, de @FaridMonti
- Somos Considerados, de @Jesi
- Somos Originales, de @CeciliaRatto
- Estamos Atentos, de @AlejandraMaria
- Somos Útiles, de @AlexandreCampbell
And I also wanted to highlight this lovely post by @FaridMonti, Community Live 2020 - Cómo fue para mí, which probably explains the emotions that we experienced better than I could describe it. So do give it a read too!
Just before I sign off, I do have to apologies to folks who were struggling to join in some of the Google Meet calls. I actually signed up and paid for a Google Workspace Business Plus plan to be able to support 250 participants in a video call but on the day itself, we found out that we were capped at 100 participants only. Also, we had planned to send out the invites using Google Calendar so that a) you would get the correct times of each session in your local time zone b) clicking on the calendar link would get you automatically accepted into the call (no need to wait for us to manually accept you), but again, I could not do so and I was capped to sending out 10 invites only. Basically, even though I’ve paid for the services, I still needed to have a credit history and 60 days from reaching that credit history to use the services without any restrictions. Those are Google’s policies to protect their services from being abused or used for spamming. Unfortunately, their Tech Support confirmed that there are no easy ways to circumvent them.
Anyway… it is what it is and we had to work with what we have.
Thank you once again for making this journey of mine so crazily epic! Never in a million years did I think I would do something like this and just circumstances and availability gave me the push to give it a go! The great team of Connect Moderators made it possible too and without their support none of this would have happened. To the community, I hope you all have had a ton of fun participating and I really, honestly do hope that it somehow had an impact on you and got you thinking about how we, as a community, can work better and bigger for 2021! It’s not going to be an easy year ahead if I were to be honest, but we can do this!
And finally, we would love to get your feedback on Community Live 2020, the various challenges that we organised, the marketing campaign on social media… basically everything related to the event! Whether you attended the event or not, we would love to hear your feedback so that we could improve ourselves in case we do something similar in the future! It’s entirely optional and anonymous. The feedback form can be found here.
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Ready for your new upcoming ideas 
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) the Spanish speaking moderators a.k.a. “Los Facheritos”