Thank you everyone for joining our virtual panel talk into the Euromeetup 2025.
The panel talk was part of the official Euromeetup 2025 program, exactly on the 2nd day. The aim of the panel was to get the Local Guides in touch with common questions about the city of Lucca, hosting the meetup, and the Local Guides program and have our fellow Local Guides from all around the world join us virtually.
Special guests of the panel talk were the responsible of the Tourism Office of Lucca, Remo Santini, and our special guest Julie Abbas, our community manager.
The first talk was for Remo, his office did an amazing job featuring and hosting the Local Guides in the city so we discussed with him the impact of Google Maps on the tourism of a city such as Lucca and the role of Local Guides helping spreading the city and its touristic aspects thanks to their efforts and volunteer contributions.
We used two video’s to introduce the argument:
- the experience with @MarcoDavoli: https://youtu.be/nyshl3otkHg?si=LQXcr7J08jPX6l1z
- the experience with @manulele81: https://youtu.be/kToliCi79wc?si=UWA1H4PLsMTY2mGW
The questions for him where:
- Local Guides are universally known especially for their photos and reviews. This suggests that their role is mainly linked to commercial activities, while many of them also use their contributions to tell about the territory and culture. In fact in both videos we can see a deep relationship between Local Guides and the territory. Thinking about this, how do you see the role of Local Guides in your city?
- As you may have seen from the videos we shared with you, Local Guides also contribute in other ways, such as adding, correcting, and if necessary even closing businesses and points of interest. Or even adding roads, like me and Marco (together we have added over 200,000). Or adding Street View photos, here we have two masters of this. Did you know about these activities of Local Guides?
- Speaking of roads, did you know that there is a program, Partner with Google, that allows public administrations to upload new roads, paths, if cycle paths, directly into Google Maps? I used it, in collaboration with a municipality in the Marche, Bolognola, to add the paths of the Monti Sibillini National Park ( Bolognola senza segreti col Gps | Cronache Maceratesi ). Do you know and use this feature?
- Any advice you would like to give us on how we can better improve the information about the activities of your beautiful city?
After Remo the word was for Julie, our surprise guest who flew directly from NYC to attend the Euromeetup 2025. We discussed with her about the important role of our community and how the Local Guides program, together with Connect, are a key part of the Google Maps contributions.
Here we prepared for here three questions about three main topics of the Local Guides program: Events, Meetups, Points, levels and badges.
Furthermore we left some spaces for our Local Guides champions for a little bit self description for the community of their experiences: @LuigiZ, @ErmesT, @MarcoDavoli, @TorM, @JanVanHaver and @AdrianLunsong.
A special thank you for @AdrianLunsong for organizing as usual all the technical aspects and the live on the Go Loco YT channel.
The full panel record is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntKVFhp8eHM.