On Sunday, Feb. 16, a few local guides from both The Netherlands and Belgium came together in lovely Breda, a city in the south of the Netherlands, but close to the Belgian border. And we were joined by Dennis - that’s the name which was given to the storm that made life a bit harder that day for large parts of Western Europe. In the end the weather was not too bad, there was just a lot of wind.
We started a walk through the city center and exchanged experiences and tips of local guiding in general, but mainly with the focus on cleaning the map, obviously. After a while - with the wind clearly not planning to take a major break - we simply decided to go for a drink at one of the bars surrounding the market square. There we could dig deeper into the #LGCTM related edits.
Pretty soon a duplicate was found (at the time of writing that suggested edit is still pending, though), and I also came across an entry that was real, but had all data of an existing POI in a city 100 km away (with a valid POI shown on Maps for the business there), so that one could also be removed. And - as almost always when I open Google Maps - some map marker and category improvements were also made. Most of the time during the Meet-up, however - also here; as almost always - was spent on just talking about Maps, other Google products and the various facts of life that tend to come up in conversation.
Still I was able to define some useful tips for all local guides that want to host their own #LGCTM Meet-up:
- Remind all participants to make sure their phone is fully charged - in the picture below you can see the coffees we drank, but there is an empty space on the table: that’s where the phone should have been of one of the participants, but unfortunately it was almost out of juice.
- With a group of people it is a good idea to choose a square in the center of town as a location to spend some time: there are usually a lot of businesses on the square itself, and typically a number of streets come together on the square. So what you can do is: first look at the POIs on the square with all Meet-up participants together, and then later split up in smaller goups, with each group focusing on one of the streets leading up to the square.
- Keep the overview of tips given in the main #LGCTM post at your disposal and just put the tips that apply to a real life test then and there, one after the other.
And in case you decide to host your own Local Guides Clean The Map Meet-up: don’t forget to tag me, so I can add your Meet-up to the overview.
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