Thoughts on running your Local Guide local city community out of Connect

[PaulPavlinovich]

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I've been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts...

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don't like this as I'm a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they'd also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

[AkmalB]

Hi @PaulPavlinovich

I think the best way is to enter the location and tag cities as you write. 

Mentioning more than 10 peoples in one post is not a good way to promote community.

Have a nice day 

[LucioV]

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I've been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts...

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don't like this as I'm a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they'd also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

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For Italian Local Guides community this is easy, because we can use the Italian language board; i think that the languages could be expanded to all the ex-supported communities almost.

But this is not a solution for all the english speaking countries...

Maybe an official tag could be a solution.

My tag could be #italialg 

[Csaba]

Hi @PaulPavlinovich, tagging is an excellent tool (unless someone abuses the function and maybe even tags his/her post incidentally with something you figured would be good for your community). 

The traffic of Hungarian guides is rather low in Connect and I understand why Google does not want to start a subforum for each language in the "conversation by Language" board so I got used to tag Hungary related discussions with the tag "magyar" (for Hungarian). 

The same way posts can be organized by communities, I guess. Just find a good tag that would not be used incidentally for other reasons (and when it's abused on purpose, you, as a moderator can remove it any time 😉

[colinchaffers]

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@PaulPavlinovich wrote:

With the demise of support for independent Local Guides communities out in social networking land I asked my members of the old g+ community to move here to Connect. Many of the active ones did. One of the challenges of using Connect is finding each other. I've been thinking of the best ways to do this and am interested in your thoughts...

My thinking is that in each message destined for the local community it could be tagged with Melbourne and MelbourneCommunity then the people in and around Melbourne might find it easier to find local discussions.

You can target an announcement to up to 10 people by mentioning them, but personally I don't like this as I'm a search kind of person. I find that sort of notification a bit annoying. For me they'd also be lost because I get 100+ notifications on Connect every day.

How do you think you can reach your local Local Guides?

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Yes good idea, the tagging would be best "Country, Province/Region, Town/City"

[MrLens]

Hi @PaulPavlinovich. Its quite unfortunate that the G+ and other fora are no longer supported. Those forums gave us room to communicate with other LGs around us in a more "LOCAL" and personal way and was a great way to introduce and guide new members to the programme. I believe Google has a good reason for this move as we only know very little. On those forums, an LG can easily locate another  exchange mobile contacts, even make unofficial physical connections, and share local challenges and possible was of overcoming them. Some of these information many (myself inclusive) may not feel very comfortable sharing here on Local Guides Connect. 

On those forums, ask questions they may not feel free to ask the "World" (some of which are religious, cultural, political etc.). I believe those communities served a different purpose from LGC and we may never achieve the same effect except with significant changes.

Tagging is fine but the communal effect will hardly be achieved.

[PaulPavlinovich]

Indeed. Tagging our communities should work well @AkmalB like your use of Malaysia Local Guides I could simple use Melbourne Local Guides on posts where it is relevant (lots of my posts are general because of my moderator role).

[PaulPavlinovich]

Yes the language boards when the majority language spoken is one country and its territories and that LG community spans the whole country like yours does @LucioV but it doesn't work so well for English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, etc. which could be in many many countries and hundreds if not thousands of cities. You've got it lucky mate :).

[PaulPavlinovich]

Good thoughts @Csaba - if anyone starts to abuse the tags it would be a little problematic. While Connect Moderators can manage tags on a wholesale basis (we can delete them across an entire forum) we can't limit that action to just one post, only the Googlers can do that. We can get rid of spam tags but we can't help if someone is trolling a tag. Could be a good discussion for our next monthly hangout. I know why we can't do it, but maybe some changes could be made.

[PaulPavlinovich]

Yes good idea, the tagging would be best "Country, Province/Region, Town/City"

Yes you could do that @colinchaffers that would help with Melbourne, FL, USA and Melbourne, Vic, AU :). Or more locally for me Emerald, Vic as distinct from Emerald, QLD.