Hey everyone! Thanks for the wait.. it’s been quite busy on my end so I haven’t had a lot of time to get this recap done!! But, finally, it’s here! 
For the “Let’s Talk About Reviews” series, the participants included @Rahul001 , @SharmaK , @GasparKaren and @SarahKa . These were the folks who responded to my first post and wanted to collaborate on this series. I then started a group chat here on Connect and we exchanged about 100+ messages in that chat as we prepared for the series of post.
Personally, I had a great time collaborating with everyone as we shared ideas and questions. Rahul also helped with creating all the cover photos for everyone’s post, just so we have some consistency in the look, style and formatting.
If you’re curious to know about collaborating with others, here are some guidelines and tips:
- know your goal/objective; be clear with what you want to achieve during the collab.
- gather your participants/volunteers; find out how much time/effort that they can provide, what their skills and interests are and any idea of how they want to collaborate.
- use Connect’s group messaging as a quick way to have private discussions with your group. If you’re unfamiliar with this tool, click on your profile picture in the top right of this page, then in the pop-up menu, click on “Messages” or you can click this link to go directly to your Messages page. From there, you can send private messages to individual or to groups.
- brainstorm with your group for ideas, list of tasks and actions.
- delegate work evenly between your participants
- personally, I like a series that look/feel cohesive i.e. we have the same goals, we share the same themes. So…
- writing posts: it is helpful to have a general template that the group can copy and follow. Give guidelines on what to write about, what images to include etc
- cover photos: use a common theme, colour palette, formatting, art style
- links: share a link to the introduction post that explains what the series is all about. Share links to all the posts that make up the series! That way, readers can easily explore all the posts!
- have fun!! Everyone has a different working style so be patient, open and tolerant. It doesn’t have to be 100% perfect.. the journey to get to your goal is equally important! Group efforts also usually mean the project is bigger and more complicated so you should always make sure that you’re enjoying the process and it doesn’t feel like a chore!
Anyway, I digress.
When the series officially kicked off with the first post from Sarah, we also started to get some attention from the community and eventually @Ssiddharth2000 , @shaileno and @Gurukrishnapriya joined in the fun and shared their own experiences and tips for writing reviews. Of the three Local Guides, I had managed to share the template with Guru Krishna. Siddharth and Shailendra had already published their posts.
So, thank you again for supporting this series and joining in the fun!
The idea for this meet-up was to bring together the participants of the series and chat about the posts that they wrote, did they learn anything from the process or each other and share any further thoughts about writing reviews. Unfortunately, I could not get everyone in as I wanted it to be a smaller group to make it easier to talk about the series. Also, the original 4 Local Guides had been part of the collaborative process so I wanted to ask them for feedback about working together.
Unfortunately, working as a group is always challenging to get a common free time available so Sarah missed out on the virtual meet-up.
You can watch the edited live stream below. I managed to fix the missing audio at the start; we had about 5 minutes of silence as I didn’t realise my streaming setup was not done correctly! Huge thanks to the YouTube audience @anon73568702 and @FazZ for quickly sounding the alarm!
Anyway, I hope that you’ll watch the full discussion above. We had some great discussion with the panel as well as the general attendees as we covered lots of topics including hidden reviews!
And lastly, in case you missed the series, here are the links to the various posts.
- Reference: Tips for contributing high quality reviews (Google Support page)
- Reviewing Connects by @SarahKa
- Planet Friendly Reviews by @SharmaK
- Reviewing with a Purpose by @Rahul001
- Opinion Matters by @shaileno
- Fun Way to Write Meaningful Reviews by @Ssiddharth2000
- Stay organized while you review by @GasparKaren
- Reviewing As A Backpacker by @AdrianLunsong
- Let’s Talk About Reviews’ Virtual Meet-up on 27 Sept 2025
- Reviews with a passion by @Gurukrishnapriya
Enjoy and thanks to everyone who was at the virtual meet-up!
Thank you so much, 
Your insights on maintaining consistency and structure in reviews were truly inspiring and added great value to the entire series.
