2022
Unlike all my meet-up's, I thought of making a difference this time.
When I was getting ready to the meet-up, two ideas clicked in me and I executed them straight away. The prime one is to encourage accessibility! I deliberately encouraged all the participants of the meet up to contribute to accessibility as much as they can.
The other one is, something strange. It has been a custom that the meet-up host is the one who is always writing recaps about meet-up's and I feel like boasting. This time I insisted all the participants of the meet up to share their feedback or their experience on connect.
I selected a random location out of Colombo this time. However, unexpectedly there were quite a lot of participants than I expected. The sky was cloudy and it was almost about to rain just before the meet up when I arrived the destination.
Moreover, I got a call from @NalinK few hours before the meet up telling that certain roads to the destination are closed due to an event at the parliament area. I was a bit dismayed.
However, I reached the destination hoping at least few participants will attend. I was the first one to reach the destination. I was walking around the aquarium situated in the park capturing some photos. After about five minutes wait, @ThamaraKandabada joined me. Then joined @Shafranlive, @AsankaJayasuriya, @nazeem, @NalinK, @Amilamadushan, Dinesh & @malitha2 us one by one. I was explaining one by one about what we were about to do once they reached the destination. However, Nalin explained the last person who arrived as I was exhausted already.
The theme of the day
It was planned to be a photo walk. As I am quite concerned about accessibility; I insisted everyone to have an eye on accessibility throughout the meet-up and in all meet-up's they attend. Even though this is not an accessibility meet up, it is reasonable to help the differently abled without time limits because we see them everywhere and as physically well-being constituents of the society, we have the responsibility to do so.
I used to share stickers among all the participants at meet-up's I host as a custom. I had two local guides iron-on stickers for t-shirts this time. So, I had a challenge among them to give it off.
I gave them a photography challenge on accessibility. The challenge was, the one who contributes more to the accessibility through their photographs will get the stickers. Walk begun. Everybody took photos. Nalin and Shafran were interested in capturing the sunset too. Shafran took some good quality photos and showed to everyone. Shafran is normally known to be a good photographer with some latest gadgets.
Also, there was a newcomer who attended from Negombo, which is quite far from the destination. He is Malindu. I gave t-shirts for all the new participants. Unfortunately, Dinesh couldn’t fit into the sizes I had. So, I promised to give him one in the next meet up. Also, I gave some local guide badges to them too.
After the meet-up, we had more than thirty minutes of informal chat on improving the quality of photos and the meet-ups in future.
At last, we were about to reveal the winner of the day who gets those iron-on stickers. I didn’t count their photos individually, I asked them to reveal their count. Ultimately, Nazeem had the top number of places with accessibility and he got the sticker.
Then I shared the stickers (which I collected from LG summit 2017) and encouraged them. They were all happy.
I had another iron-on to be given off. I didn’t want to be biased. So, we had a raffle. I wanted them to count from 1-9. I asked one person to give a call to @AnuradhaP. After having a general chat with Anuradha over the phone, I told him that there is a raffle going on and I asked him to pronounce a number from 1-9. And the lucky one was "7" and it's Thamara
After winding up the meet up we all returned home with much fun.
As mentioned above, there will be an experience sharing reply post from all the participants attended to this meet up and I will be repeating this as a custom in all the meet-up's I host in future.
Thanks for the recap, @IlankovanT. I guess it's my turn now to talk about yesterday's events, and I'm quite glad to.
Despite having contributed to Google Maps over 2 years and being a Level 8 Local Guide, this was my first ever meet-up. Needless to say, I was pretty excited. So I showed up at the place about 10 minutes in advance, and seeing nobody I could recognize, I walked around for a bit. Then I ran into @IlankovanT. Although I had seen his work and admired it from afar, it was the first time we met. A little after that @Shafranlive arrived, and we waited for the others while casually chatting and getting to know each other.
Within the next 30 minutes or so, the whole gang had arrived, and we started walking around taking pictures. Before we kicked off, @IlankovanT told us about his accessibility photos challenge, and we were all game.
@Shafranlive gave me his hand-held gimbal to use when shooting video, but I just couldn't get the hang of it no matter how much I tried. (It's a lot harder than it looks!) I ended up shooting videos steadying the phone on my hand instead.
While we were walking down taking photos, an elderly lady walked up to me and asked why we were doing so. She had had a dispute with a government urban planning body, and she had assumed we were affiliated with the government. She was quite concerned that we took photos of her shop. I had to explain to her that we were not involved with any government body, and that were just doing this to update a map that people can use. Fortunately, she understood.
I ended up taking 75+ photos of places. I spent the morning today adding them to Maps, and making edits based on the information on those photos. This exercise earned me more than 450 points.
I also took some photos of the gang while we were wandering around. Here they are:
My first meet up experience was rather wonderful, and I can't wait to do this again!
Allow me to share my experience briefly...
I think I have participated more than 10 meetups so far but this time it was a bit different to the previous meets. We all were asked to focus on accessibility and @IlankovanT promised us that he will give us a special sticker. Thus it was fun because I tried to collect as many as possible accessibility capture and share it on the google map. Eventually, I managed to capture 12 spots and I think I came 2nd place in the game. Even though, I couldn't win the game @IlankovanT gave gifts to everybody, I got two stickers. Thank you bro.
However, I took many photos and uploaded to the map and updated some missing details of few shops. thanks to the meet-up, could get many points. In the end, we all had a long discussion and learned a number of new things about 360 cams and google street view, and @Shafranlive, @NalinK, @nazeem, @Amilamadushan shared their experiences about many things. Finally, it was a very successful event, and I was happy bc I could attend to it and thanks @IlankovanT for hosting such an event. 🙂
