“Why am I doing this?!”
When I started to write this post, many thoughts have come across my mind, but I’ve stopped with one, when a friend of mine has asked me last year, why you are contributing to the maps for free?!
In our modern life, it’s a common thing that you would get paid for such an efforts, so I understand the reason behind my friend’s question, because all of us – true Local Guides – are doing a great contributions and are spending a good amount of time to add new content to this awesome platform: rating places, collaborating together in Connect,…etc.
It may be not very obvious to some, what is the great influence you can make thru the maps’ powerful platform. If you can imagine the number of people who are using this platform every second on every day, you can realize the number of situations where you have helped a great number of people to save time and efforts finding their way and enjoying their travel, It may have helped a patient to find a good physician quickly, or it may have saved some lost lives, and the situations are endless!
My believes that with each submission to this platform, we do create a new space to millions of people around us, where they can find and explore places to enjoy their life.
Although I’m very keen to keep my contributions constant since I’ve joined the program, but the last period between end of 2018 till the moment, have dramatically changed and there has been other dimensions has been added to my contribution, which I will try to summarize in the following points:
Spam and wrong data
It’s a great thing for every Local Guides to add a new place and photo for the missing locations, but I’ve realized lately that our mission should include something else: the data quality review of other inputs. Because in a country like Egypt where I’m living, we have to make sure that every place has the correct bilingual naming, correct location on which side of the street, the correct business hours (many get confused with AM and PM), imagery free of selfies and only showing the place not the people around,……etc.
There is also the map-anchors’ thieves where they try to take any of the successful locations with the highest review ranking, then tries to replace the data with another one!
So, there is a lot of engagement and involvement from all the LGs to review and ensure not only their inputs are above the required quality, but only have a good eye over what others are adding to their communities.
Here in Egypt, we have taken some serious steps to ensure that our maps have a low number of such issues, where we have created a special group to report spams, stolen locations and any mis-leading data for the locations we are well aware of.
Also, we take it on our responsibility to ensure the quality of photos and reviews as per the standards of the program and I believe we have achieved a good mile stone up to the moment.
This leads me to the other point:
Egypt LG Community
Lately, I’ve joined forces with the top LGs within Egypt, and we have tried lately to build the awareness of the program and what is the benefits of doing a great contribution for the program. Together, we were able to attract the existing LGs from the different governates in Egypt and in same time we try to mentor and support them.
We have arranged a number of different walks and meet-ups to meet face-to-face with all of the community members, trying to mentor and learn from their experiences and we have found a number of amazing members where they will be a great add to our community.
There is more topics which I’d like to share with you in a further post.
I believe there is more to be achieved for our community and the best is yet to come.
Cheers,
