Is Connect a community?

[FaridTDF]

Muchas gracias @AdrianLunsong, tú pensamiento es muy claro y explícito, y lo más importante resume muchos pensamientos, de varios usuarios aquí en Connect y fuera de el, los que no participan y son Local Guides.

Tienes una manera muy racional de plantear los distintos puntos, lo cual me parece, por un lado didáctico y por el otro más comprensible, ya que de alguna manera yo no supe cómo poder explicar el poco aporte de algunos LG en Connect y tú pudiste enumerar una por una las distintas dificultades que varios encuentran a la hora de publicar en Connect, o más aún de relacionarse con otros LG, como es el caso de los distintos participantes de los Summit y del Connect Live. Yo en un primer momento pensé que eran los famosos influencer que solo participaban en otros lugares, pero tu mirada un poco más aguda, quizás encontró el motivo principal por el cual ellos no participan o sólo participan en los tableros exclusivos...

Al poco tiempo que se largo Connect 2.0, yo tuve un dejo de rebelión hacia el, tuve mi más bajo ratio de participación en el, la verdad es que no podía encontrar nada, (jajaja no cambio mucho), pero ahora tengo una actitud frente a él un poco más indiferente y de alguna manera como tú, me concentro solo en los tablones que si me interesan, que es “Viajes” he “Historias Locales”, a los demás casi ni entro solo después de agotar mi interés en esos dos, casi como tú concentrándote solo en los tableros exclusivos y en pocas personas...

Con respecto a las ideas que aportas, te cuento que ya tienes mi voto positivo en las tres, para el caso que decidas postearlas, son buenas ideas y necesarias para que Connect evolucione y realmente pueda caminar y ser un lugar realmente viable y no solamente un proyecto de segunda mano, casi irrelevante y para tapar un agujero. En este sentido en ocaciones pienso que tiene los días contados como G+, espero que solo sea un mal pensamiento, ya que realmente creo que tiene el potencial para evolucionar. Pero las cosas evolucionan si el mediambiente que le rodea es propicio, en pocas palabras un árbol 🌳  crece si lo regamos 🚰  y lo cuidamos podando ✂️ las ramas que crecen mal🍃, removemos la tierra ⛏ de vez en cuando, a Connect le falta evolucionar y actualizarse a la realidad de todos los usuarios 🙂.

nuevamente Adrian, te doy las gracias 

saludos Farid.

[LucioV]

@AdrianLunsong I will read tomorrow and reply in a longer way. You wrote a lot of interesting things.

[JulienH]

@AdrianLunsong I like your reply alot. @FaridTDF thank you for kicking this off and thinking about the community.

Here are my 2 cents about it.

(Better put up a disclaimer here that these are all my own guesses, nothing in this post is official Google, alright?) 😃

Like some others here, it was a shock coming to the Local Guides Connect (LGC) platform after we were on Google+ communities. The style, feel, type of interaction, it's very very different. I didn't like it at all and I still don't feel wholly comfortable with it. But I can see the rationale, and that is what we need to review - the purpose of LGC, and the design and structure of it now.

First LG, and LGC aren't like super big products of Google. Let's be truthful, Maps is billion user, but LG itself not so much. Maps is a Product area that is big and important. LG is a section within Maps. Maps has the focus and need to be a standalone app, LG definitely did not start off with that amount of focus, resources and project team. I'm sure LG team has grown considerably, as LG has been fairly successful. We don't know the internal metrics and targets but hey it's still around and not yet deprecated like many other Google products. haha. 

So this means that LG started off in a very ghetto way? Using free-to-use Google+ communities, organized by volunteer members. Other than one official community, all others were unofficial. But there was a good traction with many local communities. People joined the hundreds of unofficial communities, followed posts, commented, joined hangout calls, attended meetups. I think there were also some attempts on Facebook etc.

Then LG grew a bit bigger? G+ communities could not do so many things. No badges, no integration with LG levels, no voting, no tagging etc. Again let's face it, G+ was a stagnant and obviously soon-to-be-deprecated side of Google. It's now official but the writing was on the wall. LG cannot go down with G+. LG needed its own ground to live on. In came LGC. 

Now LG is still not so fully staffed with so many engineers. Engineers are dedicated to Maps, mapping initiatives and developing LG functions on Maps platform. That's the important part of LG. LGC is a side thing, and a big corporation would not and probably should not dedicate important engineering resource to developing an ancillary supporting feature. So in came a forum setup, with customization to link to our LG levels. version 1 obviously look terrible and did not have any mobile support. It was a huge pain to use. I don't know how we stuck through that but we did. Forcing us to use it to apply for Summits was a necessary evil. haha.

Having a central LGC also meant that now we are one big LG "community" instead of disparate ones. As Adrian and Farid are pointing out, what's happening to our community? We went from truly local and fully relevant G+ groups, of 10s to 100s to 1000s of people, to one big forum of 100,000s, to 1,000,000s of people? We won some and we lost a lot.

We now have a big group. Your posts now can be seen by the whole world. Amazing. Official Google posts and now possible to be shared together. Topics like photography, food, etc, can be shared with anyone. That's a big plus.

We lost our local posts. Heck it's no longer possible to keep track of what's happening to our local friends. I want to see posts about Singapore, I can hardly do it. In LGC v1 it was kinda barely there, in LGC v2, it's a hack to get there. People could no longer find "Singapore Local Guides" and join, people could no longer easily get updates about meetups in their city. I find that was a huge loss in that aspect.

But we need to see whether the loss is worth the gain.

Of course LGC is in V2 redesign, massively prettier, more mobile friendly, no more dumb kudos of everything, somewhat fewer spam posts. The Summit criteria has also been tweaked. in year1 and year2, engagement with LGC was paramount to growth and that's where the focus really went. In year3, I think mapping contributions are more varied and more rewarded. Quality of posts has increased overall. Local engagement still is terrible. It's terrible and I call it terrible. 

But really, what have we gained over these initial years?

- Highly grown Local Guides Connect branding. dedicated URL, dedicated marketing area, better SEO/SEM.

- Improving global forum

- More engagement with Googlers

The design of the platform needs to fit the use case. 

There are studies on how many people we can effectively interact with. It's just restrictions on mindshare, time, attention span.

A close-friends whatsapp chat, maybe 5-10 persons would be good. Too many and it's too distant, too impersonal, too spammy, too many pings.

A bigger interest chat/group, maybe 20-100 persons would be good? or even up to a few hundred. Enough to get sufficient attendance at gatherings, but still get to know everybody's names. hang out nice, keep the group fun.

What if you have 1000 people? Wow that's bigger. So you now have a more 1:1000 announcement style of events. It's hard to talk. Can still spread information but you lose the discussion aspect. That's why brainstorming and discussions have to work in small groups. 

What if you have 1,000,000 people? Now it's more of a forum style. You can't have a chat group of 1,000,000 right? 

LGC is the official place to bring together 1 million people. It is designed as the place to showcase, encourage and promote LG activity. So what it has done is tell people, hey this is how you should LocalGuides, by doing photography, food, meetup, etc etc, and this is how others have done it. The sections are laid out here. By cutting across countries, it is able to have all the photography together, all the food together. It is building up a shared culture of good posts because if we split into country level, there would not be sufficient content within each section. I think this is still true. The amount of good content is still not that high if we divide by 100 countries or 1000 cities. 

For newbies who aren't sure what LG is, or what to do in LG, this is a great start and landing page. I myself might not identify with all of it but I'm sure some of it interests me.

Of course this in turns, loses the local aspect quite a bit. I use a trick to search for posts mentioning Singapore, but it's tedious. And I really don't see many posts, maybe a small handful each week. Local engagement is low. I think this could be improved on, but maybe or maybe it isn't time yet. We need a critical mass of central posts to keep it going, and then diversify more. 

But if you think hard about it, yes Local and Personal are very very fun and exciting aspect of LG/LGC, and it's one we enjoy so much as close friends, but is it really critical to the whole LG experience. As a LG, you start off with your own little Maps app, doing your own reviews etc. None of that requires collaboration. It's quite a personal thing. And that is totally fine. We should recognise that there are excellent LGs out there with great reviews and photos who might not want to interact on a forum or a chatgroup. In that sense, a 1:1,000,000 forum and announcement site is important for this. They can come in, easily see how people do great reviews and photos around the world, low commitment.

Scale. chat groups and small communities need to scale to millions of users. Google needs this to scale. Scale means we community people cannot manage groups of 1000s or 100,000s of people effectively, sustainably. Small groups and close knit groups are highly seasonal, variable, susceptible to people dropping out, group dynamics, people getting along well with each other, us having the time and energy to dedicate to it. We all have our lives and work to attend to as well! So a forum is more self-sustaining in the long run and larger scale. 

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So how. I think LGC definitely is lacking the space and freedom for smaller groups to develop, thrive and find each other. LGs are depending on their own willpower to drive Instagram communities, facebook communities, whatsapp communities, etc. I see some people spending incredible amount of their own time, energy, and money in these events. It's an outlier, but impressive.

Google stressed meetups for some time, but don't really provide sufficient tools and discovery for it to grow and be successful. Hosting a gathering between people we already know, is not the same as trying to host a meetup for other people to learn what LG is. The latter depends on more public discovery that only Google has the access to. Prior Google did a fair amount of local events, which was wonderful. Then it dropped off. Now Connect Live has come to a few other countries. I am so happy about that. But it's slow. They can't be in every city. So Google needs to support local efforts, with tools, resources, publicity etc. 

But I don't know. A big part of LG for me is to make new friends from different countries. I won't be so interested in going out in my own city, I find I know it quite well. So a big global LGC also does well in this for me?

Is the current LGC a community? yes but maybe not the one we expected or looking for. I think there's space for other smaller breakaways, whether inside LGC or currently outside of it. 

[FaridTDF]

Me impresiona su madures de análisis @JulienH, no hay duda que si seguimos escarbando aquí, encontraremos petróleo, por el momento solo sale agua empetrolada, son muchos los buenos pensamientos que pueden mejorar lo que es Connect, lo tengo que leer de nuevo,para poder responder con más propiedad, lo podré hacer mañana ya son las 00:33 AM en Río Grande.

Saludos Farid.

[OmerAli]

Excellent post @AdrianLunsong, it cannot get better than that.
Your ideas for Local community tailored boards exactly resonates with my thoughts and feedback I shared during the sessions.

In all honesty, I believe your post summarized all the ideas/feedback/feature requests from all of us CL18 attendees.

I totally agree with your words, if its a community it must be backed by a number of users who find it easy to network and stay updated.

Content is King these days, but overdo that and you end up getting forums of 90s that only hogs your bandwidth and screams endless scrolling through the posts.

I am sure that @brittym will be pleased to read your post as you honestly highlighted pretty much everything that #LocalGuidesConnect lacks, the things we need to add and mostly the things we must focus on in order to make it truly a Global platform for every local guide (both from technical flexibility as well as from community engagement perspective).

[brittym]

@AdrianLunsong @FaridTDF @JulienH @OmerAli What a well thought out post and thread to dig into this morning! Thank you all for openly sharing your ideas and feedback (and feeling comfortable and empowered enough to do so!) If there's one thing I can say in response to all of this, so far, it's that whether you're located in the U.K., Argentina, Singapore, Pakistan, or anywhere in between: your voices are heard by our team, so keep the feedback coming.

P.S. Adrian: I'm grateful our private board gave you the will to dive in! 🙌🏼

[FaridTDF]

Hola @JulienH, hoy releí tu pos con mas atención y es muy creativo, y lleno de buenos consejos,  comparto muchos puntos de los que mencionas, por ejemplo en lo referente a la masa crítica, hoy somos pocos todavía, y de la misma manera que tu utilizo algunos trucos para poder filtrar los post que antiguamente estarían en el tablero de español, pero igual que tu también veo que no son muchos, sino todo lo contrario, muy pocos y para colmo , los que publican publican en ingles a pesar de ser hispano hablante en forma nativa, por eso tampoco extraño demasiado Connect 1.0, , creo que también que esta evolucionando el actual Connect, quizás no con la velocidad que desearemos pero también, la cantidad de recursos asignados a este proyecto no son tantos, espero que estas reflexiones sean un pequeño aporte de nuestra partes, entusiastas usuarios de Connect, a que con el tiempo se adapte mas a nuestras necesidades.

Gracias por tu pensamientos.

Farid.