01-23-2017 01:44 PM
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
01-25-2017 04:06 AM
Solution@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:
What we will do:
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.
01-23-2017 02:12 PM
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 😞
01-23-2017 02:38 PM
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! 🙂
01-23-2017 02:52 PM
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!
01-23-2017 02:55 PM - edited 01-23-2017 04:20 PM
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 🙂
01-25-2017 04:06 AM
Solution@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:
What we will do:
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.
01-30-2017 12:00 PM
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