Top 100 Country Summary Leaderboard Part 2 (December, 2022)
As you can see and will appreciate, the Top 100 leaderboards are complex and because of the limit on the number of characters in any one message on Connect, I’ve had to split the Country Summary leaderboard into two parts. This is by no means an ideal solution but is the best that I can do in the short term. So here is the second part of the Country Summary leaderboard. The first part can be seen here.
Totally agree with you @Mikeinthefalls , it’s a great collection of holiday photos. There were many more sent in but of course I had to narrow it down to 10 or so and believe me it wasn’t an easy decision to make because they are all awesome holiday photos, each and everyone worthy of being featured. But alas, some of the ones that I didn’t use in this post will be used very soon elsewhere
I also agree with you Mike that highlighting each country and of course the honorees in these countries is nice. Believe me it wasn’t at all easy to achieve but from the result and all the responses, the effort was certainly well worth it.
Thanks you for your nice comment of appreciation @TravellerG .
As well as giving us all a different viewpoint of our contributions from one country to the next, as well as the friendly competition and fun element inherent in these leaderboards, if they motivate and help us learn how to improve on our contributions and from this achieve better outcomes and hence we become better Local Guides, then the effort that goes into producing them will be well worthwhile and my mission will have been accomplished
Oh @Stephanie_OWL you poor girl. I held you in suspense for so long with hints here and there, and of course as you mentioned, I was dying to let the cat out of the bag but refrained and had to wait patiently.
Anyway, I am so happy that you love what it was all about. However, it isn’t over yet lol because there is more to come. Unfortunately some things were held back because, together with some technical issues and of course Connect’s number of characters per message limitation which we hit, time was my enemy. But anyway, I wanted to end 2022 with a bit of a bang and the feature holiday photos as well as the new Country Summary leaderboard were a major part of my plan.
I’m so happy that you also like the new Country Summary leaderboard @JustJake which I will say a bit more about when I finish replying to everyone.
Thank you also Jake for your appreciation of the what goes into making all this happen. Can we top what we’ve done? I think we can and together we will have a go at this in 2023
Actually when updating my own stats I did notice the new fields order and was tempted then and there to make the necessary changes in the data entry system but it wasn’t a priority then but I will certainly tackle this during the holidays
Yes the Country Summary leaderboard is certainly an interesting one and packed with a lot of details and allows us to make many interesting observations that without the summary, we would otherwise not have been able to easily see. The number of Local Guides in a given country is certainly an interesting outcome that the Country Summary leaderboard raises to the surface. I have a hunch that we can learn something from this!
I’m not sure that I agree with our comment about the performance of countries with larger Local Guide communities but perhaps this needs more analysis.
If people forget or choose not to update their data they remain on the board with their last updated data but of course run the risk of taking a slide down the leaderboards and potentially even off the leaderboards. I described this in the leaderboard documentation as self cleansing feature of the leaderboards.
Regarding your last comment, as you know I have been collecting contribution data across all areas almost from the very start and I had in fact planned to release this month what you have mentioned but sadly,some things had to be held back because, together with some technical issues and the one that popped up at the very last minute regarding Connect’s number of characters per message limit, time was my enemy so some things that I wanted to release were had to be postponed. This, together with other nice things I have in the pipeline (hint, hint @Stephanie_OWL ) gives us something to look forward to in 2023.
Finally, the Average Star Views/Day metric is over the lifetime of the star photos. Having said this, I had thought about also providing a moving average for both this metric and the Average Views/Photo.
I’m really pleased that you also like the new Country Summary leaderboard @TerryPG . Difficult as it is to produce I think it is packed with useful information from which we can much more easily make observations about contributions from one country to another.
Hmmm I thought I replied to your other comment but I must admit that I have been very much sleep deprived over the last few days. Anyway, I think your friend Melanie is a real trooper in what she does. If only you had mentioned all this when I asked for details about the holiday photos!
I’m really pleased that you also like the new Country Summary leaderboard @LightRich and totally agree with you that it gives us an excellent overview of each category that we didn’t see before. There’s more in the pipeline
Thanks @tony_b I’m so glad you also like it. It’s the BIG picture view so to speak and nicely summaries all the other leaderboards. Much easier to make the observations that so many are making and talking about like the one you mention regarding @Robert24 and @kasunaaa and I have to add, I’m so happy to see that you are exploring and analyzing the details. The devil is in the details
Thank you for your appreciation @DshottDennis and I’m so glad that as a newbie to the leaderboards you are getting right into it. I have said many times and will say it again, the leaderboards are much, much more than being about rankings of Local Guides and if you can grasp this I believe you will get a lot more out of participating.
I must finish off by congratulating you on your amazing photo views achievement. Why don’t you think about adding your star photo and filling that vacancy in New Zealand’s roll call
It’s great to see that you’re still loving all this @Mo_TravelleerX and yes it keeps getting better which you will recall I said t would one we got onto the right platform. Getting off the Google Form was the best move we made. It took a lot of work but now we have the foundations for exciting new ways of looking at our contributions and outcomes achieved.
But you know what you have to do to be featured @Trail_blazer . Look at the leaderboards, look at those achieving and learn from their contributions and from this improve on yours
Well I think I have now replied to everyone’s comments so I just want to finish off by saying how excited I am that everyone loves the new Country Summary leaderboard.
Indeed, as well as nicely summarizing all the other detailed country leaderboards, the beauty of this Country Summary leaderboard is that it highlights things that we would otherwise not be able to readily see unless you spent many hours comparing and analyzing all the other leaderboards.
Examples of this are countries where the honor of leading in all metrics goes to the one Local Guide yet in other countries the honor is shared by a number of Local Guides. Another observation that particulalry interests me is that while one Local Guide may lead in the photo views and/or star views metric, another Local Guide might lead in the Average Views/Photo and/or the Star Views/Day metric. This is the case for example in the United States where @MattGatlin has the highest Star Views while @Mikeinthefalls has the highest Star Views/Day. Similarly you will see in Italy @AT_Rome has the highest Star Views but fellow Connect Moderator @LuigiZ has the honor of the highest Star Views/Day. And there are many other similar examples!
Of course, as usual, everyone needs to check their data and then browse while checking the data overall as I do make mistakes, not many though For example, in the case of Vietnam, no one is shown as having the highest Star Views/Day but one would have thought that given that @user_not_found has the highest Star Views then if there’s no one else you would expect that he would also have the the highest Star Views/Day! So as usual, the devil is in the details and this is why it’s very everyone needs to checks their data.
As I mentioned at the outset when I first released the country based leaderboards, what I like most about them is that they give all Local Guides, even those in the smallest countries and countries where the opportunities of guiding are far less than in other countries, to be on the honors list. So I say, well done to everyone on the list in one metric or another. Congratulations to you all!
I’m looking forward to more new features next year.
One last comment related to the naming of this Leaderboard.
The “100” in the title is still confusing. You proabably consider “Top 100” as a concept, while reading “Top 100 Local Guides in each Country (December 2022)” literally means you should list the 100 best from each country. I would just take out the "100 ".
@AdamGT Just noticed this comment about “Getting off the Google Form was the best move we made”. I saw in another thread that someone was complaining about this platform being separate from the main Local Guides Connect page. Maybe you need to do more to ensure everyone understands the history of what you’re doing here and the progress to where we’ve reached now.
Yes I actually gave this some thought before posting @MortenCopenhagen but in the end decided to leave it as is for 2022 My main focus now is this 100,000 Connect character limit because I will hit it again and again with the new stuff that is coming in 2023 (:hint, :hint @Stephanie_OWL ). While after many iterations I ended up with what you see in this first release of the Country Summary leaderboard. I quite like the design, it’s clear, simple and self explanatory but reluctantly, because of Connect’s character message limitation, I may be forced to make drastic changes to it.
Do you like the current design? Can you think of a better way of presenting this summary data? What do others think about this?
Google Forms, which we introduced in July 2021 for the data entry side of this project, is an excellent product @tony_b but as you know, in our case it proved to be not so capable at providing the advanced data validation that we needed and in terms of design ended up being some 40 pages long which was daunting, bewildering and complex to many Local Guides keen to participate
The Google Forms limitations forced me to develop my own system in late 2021/early 2022. Released in April 2022 with basically only 3 pages for data entry, this made the data entry much easier, simpler and faster for participating Local Guides and it gave me total control of most everything. It provides a much better foundation to add features like we now have, such as data tracking, data mining and health checks.
The history of this now nearly 2.5 year project is better explained in the History section of the leaderboard documentation. I do try to keep this documentation up to date but sometimes this slips behind. Keep in mind, this is a big project with limited resources, a very small team. There’s moi doing all the system’s design, development and maintenance, backend database administration, user registrations and user support, system documentation, marketing and publishing etc etc etc. Oh there’s also “Dexter” and “Lucy”. Anyway, for those newbies, the leaderboard documentation makes for nice light reading over the holiday season
good work