2022
I had been waiting for this for like 1 year, since when I noticed Local Guides Summit 16 was only reserved to Level 5 Guides 😞
From that moment, I seriously started documenting everything, every place I went, every restaurant I ate at, every closed road, every village I visited, every new shop opening. In less than half a year, I got to Level 5 with almost 2K photos and 3M views, and also my father, sister and friends registered and became active contributors.
Google Maps is my life. Really, there is no chance I could live in a world without it. I've been using similar apps before (City Maps 2 Go, CityMapper, etc.), I've also run my startup (Monmaps) which I pitched in front of Google managers in Paris 3 years ago, and still I have never stopped loving and using it on a daily basis. Especially now, that everything is integrated (contact addresses, events from calendar, places from Google Trips...), it's just magic. But still, there are many places where Google has no or little access, and where lots of data are missing. Examples are the narrow and empty valleys of Trentino, a really small region in the north of Italy where I come from, or many magical and hidden places like La Havana. Here is where we need to contribute! That's why I am mapping almost every place inside my region, and added tons of photos from my recent trips (like Cuba last summer): there are so many little things we can do to give people a better User Experience, offer them a more pleasant stay, help them find a dentist or a doctor. And this is all on us!
Moreover, I am an incredible fan of sharing economy and crowdsourcing in general, and I absolutely believe in what Google has been doing in this direction with the Local Guides program. In a way I was doing the same years before with CouchSurfing, a platform I love and regularly use, since it allows people to view the city with your eyes and get local recommendations from insiders who live in an area.
Unfortunately I am originally from (and back again in) Trentino, where the Local Guides Community is almost non-existent. I wanted to attend the Meetup in Milan, though I was working between Belgium and Italy those days and could not make it. However, I'm a proud believer of offline communities, and I spread the word by mouth instead of via forums. I am also in the Board of 2 of these, where I have the feeling we can really change things.
The first one is Speck&Tech, a tech community where we discuss about innovation, technology and how these can better the world, and we are trying to become a bridge between academia, research and companies, bringing together monthly more than 100 people offline. We also had presentations by a guy from Google, and I gave a talk about the "Right to be Forgotten".
The second one is a community of digital entrepreneurs, the EIT Digital Alumni, which aims at creating a vibrant, active and successful alumni network for EIT Digital, a leading pan-European ecosystem of 100+ top European corporations, SMEs, start-ups, universities and research institutes.
I desperately want to be at this year's Local Guides Summit, since I feel like THAT is the place I need to be. Not only because I would feel so much at home, in a multicultural and multilingual environment within people from 6 continents only caring of making this world a better (and more informed) place.
But also since I could finally talk to people who really take the lead and the most important decisions in these processes, giving my experienced feedback (both as long-time user, and UX Designer), learning a lot about the strategies and the aims of Google (Maps), and finally diving deeply into the philosophy of the company.
Having used at least 20 different apps and services for travelling and map-making, run a startup and several competitor analyses, and struggling on a daily basis to convince people of why Google apps are better, I think I could also give a significant contribution to some of the features of the Google services.
Here my video for the application, which I shot all in a row at the first try, before noticing it was 60 and not 90 seconds 😄 So now, fingers crossed!
