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Level 7

"Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

Apparently my home city and I were winners of the challenge. I received an invitation before Christmas for my home city's local event. I RSVPed immediately, and received confirmation of my RSVP, "Address to follow."

 

The event is next week. No instructions as of this moment. As far as I know, I am a member of this community in good standing.

 

When will I receive the address and other logistics?

 

Thank you for your reply,

David

Seattle, WA, United States
6 comments

Accepted Solutions
Former Google Contributor
Solution

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

@DanielP @DavidMG Thank you both for your patience and understanding. As you both mentioned, the team has been scrambling since uncovering a massive bug in our RSVP system. The Local Guides team works really hard to put together wonderful experiences for our Local Guides and we hate when things go wrong or don't work as planned. Recently we failed to deliver a good experience to our Taipei and Toronto Local Guides and we want to apologize.  We failed to communicate well and we want to ask for your forgiveness. As a result of a technical failure and poor communication, many Local Guides were left not knowing if they were confirmed to attend the events or not. This was a bad and confusing situation and we are conducting a deep analysis of what went wrong to fix the problems going forward.

 

What happened:

 

  1. A major bug affected RSVPs in the event RSVP tool. This actually affected all of our events but particularly Taipei and Toronto. The bug caused only some of people who RSVPd to be captured in our system and thus be sent confirmation or waitlist emails.
  2. When people RSVPd, they received an email confirming their submission of their RSVP. This was not a confirmation of attendance, but the language used in this message was not clear and confused recipients.
  3. Some people received an email saying they had been added to our waitlist. This meant if spots opened up at the event, we would reach out to them to extend an invitation. The language used in this message and term “waitlist” was not clear and confused recipients.

 

What we will do:

  1. Fix the bug! This bug affected all of our events and we are trying to fix it as fast as possible.
  2. We are changing the language used in all confirmations and emails to make it very clear what the status of your invitation is.
  3. We will make the language in invitation emails more clear and explicit about how many people can attend our events. In this case we did expand the events to include more people in an attempt to accommodate the overwhelming volume of RSVPs.


We understand this was a disappointing and frustrating experience to those affected and take the situation very seriously. We are working hard to fix the issues and keep them from affecting future events. 

View solution in original post

Level 4

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

There was a problem with the email system going out to people who did not get on to the final list. If you didn't get an email by now you were not on the final guest list, sorry to say.

 

More discussion about it in the Toronto thread here: https://www.localguidesconnect.com/t5/Feedback-and-Feature-Requests/Guides-Event-in-Toronto/m-p/1131...

 

They basically got a much larger response than expected, sent out emails to the people who actually got invited, to (I think) some people on the waitlist, but people with no invitation and no waitlist seem to have received no notification so far. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news 😞

Level 7

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

Hmm. Accidents happen and mistakes occur; we each, after all, are human. So I excuse Google and its employees their initial error... But the people at Google compounded the one excusable error with two unforgivable errors 

1. When they learned they had over-invited based on space available, they should have sent corrective messages immediately. They did not.

2. When your local party (Toronto?) was questioned as to its logistics, they should have scrambled immediately and notified all other event participants. They did not.

 

Okay, I admit #2 is VERY recent, but what is the point of being so smart you can work at Google but also so stupid you fail at life?

 

Thank you DanielP for stepping up where Google employees fear to tread. If Google mucky-mucks were really smart, they would hire you in a flash. (Do not hold your breath! 🙂

Level 4

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

Haha, it's unfortunate for sure, hopefully they'll send some emails out ASAP and maybe we'll have a better event next year. From the start I think the idea was that they were sending out far more invitations than they had spots, and then they would invite a subset of those people. It was just not well communicated and set up expectations that weren't in line with what they actually were trying to do. Framing it as an invite and not a "hey, tell us if you'd be interested and we'll send invites to everyone who gets selected" was a problem.

 

To be fair, @MegS has been responding to a number of threads about it today but there are just a ton of confused people posting now, I can see how it'll take time to catch up. She did say that Toronto had ~10x the number of people say yes to the RSVP than they had spots at the event (~3k vs <300 spots), so the response must have been a surprise but I still haven't been emailed anything explaining the situation. I myself hadn't ever used this forum before today, I only found it because of this situation... maybe that's the master plan!

Level 4

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

Some people were only getting invitations on Friday and the Toronto event is tomorrow, so it's possible that your city hasn't sent the final list out. I hadn't noticed in your initial post that your event was further in the future than ours. Good luck 🙂

Former Google Contributor
Solution

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

@DanielP @DavidMG Thank you both for your patience and understanding. As you both mentioned, the team has been scrambling since uncovering a massive bug in our RSVP system. The Local Guides team works really hard to put together wonderful experiences for our Local Guides and we hate when things go wrong or don't work as planned. Recently we failed to deliver a good experience to our Taipei and Toronto Local Guides and we want to apologize.  We failed to communicate well and we want to ask for your forgiveness. As a result of a technical failure and poor communication, many Local Guides were left not knowing if they were confirmed to attend the events or not. This was a bad and confusing situation and we are conducting a deep analysis of what went wrong to fix the problems going forward.

 

What happened:

 

  1. A major bug affected RSVPs in the event RSVP tool. This actually affected all of our events but particularly Taipei and Toronto. The bug caused only some of people who RSVPd to be captured in our system and thus be sent confirmation or waitlist emails.
  2. When people RSVPd, they received an email confirming their submission of their RSVP. This was not a confirmation of attendance, but the language used in this message was not clear and confused recipients.
  3. Some people received an email saying they had been added to our waitlist. This meant if spots opened up at the event, we would reach out to them to extend an invitation. The language used in this message and term “waitlist” was not clear and confused recipients.

 

What we will do:

  1. Fix the bug! This bug affected all of our events and we are trying to fix it as fast as possible.
  2. We are changing the language used in all confirmations and emails to make it very clear what the status of your invitation is.
  3. We will make the language in invitation emails more clear and explicit about how many people can attend our events. In this case we did expand the events to include more people in an attempt to accommodate the overwhelming volume of RSVPs.


We understand this was a disappointing and frustrating experience to those affected and take the situation very seriously. We are working hard to fix the issues and keep them from affecting future events. 

Level 7

Re: "Winning the Local Guides Challenge 2016"

So. After all this mishegas, I received on Thursday afternoon my confirmed invitation, with location and all. I looked forward with anticipation to the event itself. Note the past tense?

Late Friday night, really ~2 am Saturday morning, I had to euthanize my dog. This was after he nearly bled out on the carpeting after minor surgery Friday morning/afternoon. That I am emotionally unfit to attend Wednesday's gathering is an understatement. I canceled my registration so someone other could attend. But the cancellation form left no space for reasons/explanation, and I see no PM addresses so instead I wail in public here.

Sure hope to see you all at the next event.

David