2022
So for the Community Love Challenge let me start off by saying, oh yes 2020 has certainly been a tough year! My girlfriend and I left for overseas on the day that Connect Live 2020 was announced and I was still overseas when applications for the event officially opened. I was travelling in the South Pacific through February and March when I received a message from home to urgently pack my bags and get back home because of some virus I had not heard anything about while basking in the sun and swimming in the crystal clear turquoise and warm water of the idyllic Mystery Island in the South Pacific. We were told that our Government was thinking of closing down its international travel borders! Really!
Caption: Locally caught dinner on Mystery Island (LG: @AdamGT)
Well we cut short our travels, left the amazingly beautiful tropical island paradise and rushed back home. That's when we started hearing some amazing stories about this "thing" called, COVID-19. I was really sorry and felt a lot for those that didn't get back to their respective home country in time. In hindsight, we were very lucky! I recall writing in one of my first posts when we got back home in mid-March (Australian F1 Grand 2020 Prix cancelled) that "the year 2020 is beginning to look like the year that God forgot!"
The first thing we were told was to rush to the supermarket and buy toilet paper! Really!! We couldn't understand why on earth we would need to buy toilet paper when this was some kind of virus. It just didn't make sense!!! Notwithstanding, we acted on this advice. Surprise, surprise! When we visited the supermarket, not one but several, we found all the toilet paper shelves empty! We discovered that people were stocking up on toilet paper in preparation of some long term lockdown! The world has gone mad we thought! Because we couldn't find any toilet paper at all to buy, my sister kindly gave us some of her recently purchased stock. Shortly after this we were forced into self-isolation and our international borders were closed. We ended up in a 100+ days lockdown! God bless my little sister for that toilet paper, sheesh!!
Facing this fast escalating Coronavirus epidemic/pandemic, and in total lockdown, it was very difficult to prepare an interesting Connect Live application video. I was burning the midnight oil, stressing some but I had my toilet paper! Just one minute before the application close time, I received the Google email thanking me for my application; I just got it in within a minute to spare! I'm sure that my application would have been among the very last if not the last one through the door. I posted about the impact that COVID-19 had on my application. While many LGs deserted Connect after the application close time, I stayed on with a core of others and while sorting through my photos I wrote a number of Connect posts about my travels:
- Mystery Island
- Living on a small Island
- Photos of a Different World
- Peggy's Cove
- Waterfall of the Gods
- The Grave of The Unknown Child
- Living on the Edge
- World Dessert Day?
- Let's make it a BIG chess day!
- COVID-19 Quarantined - Rebuilt my VW Campervan
- From a Palace of Industry to a place for Dog and Cat Lovers
- and so on
As well as contributing, I began engaging more with my fellow Local Guides, helping and motivating them where I could. I felt the need to encourage others to improve on the quality of their Connect Contributions. This was when I first wrote about the quality of photo contributions on both Maps and Connect - Is a picture always worth a 1000 words?
I was also interested in what factors could contribute to making our most viewed photos (which I called our star photos) and saw this as a great way to engage with fellow Local Guides and a way we could perhaps learn about our photos contribution on Google Maps. The participation of 111 Local Guides in that post and engagement and discussion over 52 pages was amazing and very rewarding, and is continuing. This soon led to the sequel Leaderboards of Photo Views post with participation of 208 Local Guides including 22 Connect Moderators which is continuing in the updated Leaderboards post of November 5. These posts were intentionally designed in a way to allow for and encourage participation of Local Guides at all levels. These posts showed that when it comes to our photos contribution, quality wins over quantity. Interestingly, they also showed that some Local Guides at lower levels were out performing many, including myself, at higher Local Guide levels!!! I learnt something powerful! Finally, for a bit of fun, I created the Top 100 Photo Views List, designed to continue the engagement and bring together in the one place many of the photo view achievement posts in the Achievement topic of Connect.
It is through these posts that I have encouraged engagement, and not at a trivial level, with hundreds of fellow Local Guides from all over the world. Interestingly, these posts have also fleshed out many otherwise silent or Local Guides just lurking on Connect. Here are just a few example comments made in these posts:
- In his comment of 24 July, 2020 @Herve_Andrieu wrote "@AdamGT definitely started the best conversation I've seen in a very long time around here! Congrats!".
- In a comment of 24 November, 2020 @4898inc wrote "I've been a LG for several years but never really connected with this group. The whole rankings setup and what you are doing is fantastic, I feel as if I'm becoming part of a world group with common likes, thank you so much for that."
- In a comment on 11 November 2020, @AT_Rome wrote "I am happy to share my profile to participate in this race, which is not - mind you - a competition but only an opportunity to meet other passionate Local Guides around the world, and see the wonderful photos posted, be they few or many."
- In a comment of 25 November, 2020 @Anil6969 wrote "Thanks for such a nice and detail post @AdamGT its really inspiring to see the post from so many LG,"
By far it is this engagement with my fellow Local Guides that has led to my favorite moments that I have experienced in the Local Guides community thus far from 2020, the year that God forgot!
Adam
#CommunityLive2020 #CommunityLoveChallenge
