Announcement:
I have removed our volunteer staff recruitment post here for the unofficial Local Guides Academy. This is because I do not wish to use the Connect Forum to publicly promote membership to our unofficial local guides community while our activities are under review by the Local Guides Team.
As the owner of our unofficial initiative, I represent a group of good citizens of the local guides community that all act in good faith and are committed to promote best practice and to facilitate learning opportunities, within the global #LocalGuides community.
The official Local Guides program is a community-driven approach to keep the data on Google Maps correct and meaningful to the users of Google’s maps. To prevent abuse of this program and to protect the its participants against abuse (like harassment), certain program rules are in place.
These rules can be found here: https://www.google.com/local/guides/rules/
It is permitted to engage with other local guides outside the framework of the official program. But like with everything else in life, you do so at your own discretion and as an individual, independent of the official program.
Our unofficial local guides community is governed by Council Members, who are all respected and active members of the official Local Guides Program who have individually decided that by sharing resources, ideas, experience, etc. they can help each other to be better and more efficient contributors to the program.
From my personal viewpoint, this is something that should be applauded if it does not work against the intentions the official Local Guides Program.
As an unofficial, unsupported and currently unendorsed community, our collaborative community aims to initiate projects and programs that we shall share with other Local Guides, for their benefit and the overall benefit of the Local Guides program. We shall do so as good citizens of the Local Guides Community, keeping the membership organization that initiated the project or program “in the background” as far as the official Google platforms are concerned.
For questions and answers, please feel free to visit our Help Desk at http://localguides.academy/help-desk/
Jeroen Mourik
2022
