February 21, 2024 was a special day for me. The members of Bangladesh Local Guides and I gathered on this day to celebrate the milestone of our 10 years journey.
Starting on March 7, 2014, Bangladesh Local Guides have come this far with the support of its dedicated and passionate members. It was no surprise that all the members were so thrilled and excited about the event. I felt honored to be able to host this milestone meetup.
We celebrated this mega meetup at a place called Fatimaâs Dell. Initially it was scheduled to be held on February 16, but we could not manage the logistic support on time and hence we had to reschedule it to Feb 21, on International Mother Language Day.
As I mentioned earlier that Bangladesh Local Guides started its journey on March 7, we celebrated the milestone 2 weeks earlier just because of me. After 6+ years this year I was visiting Bangladesh during this time. I did not want to miss the chance of being a part of this mega event. The members of Bangladesh Local Guides agreed to push the date back so that I could be a part of it. Canât thank the team enough for giving me this opportunity.
About 200 members from all over Bangladesh were invited to attend this mega event. However, due to International Mother Language Day, some members could not attend the event as they had prior commitment with their respective workplaces. A number of 174 people participated in this mega event, including some guests and Local Guides members. We prioritized the members from most of the districts of the country to participate in this event, in addition to old and new members. We also had some guests from government and private organizations who were involved with our activities before.
We wanted to make this event a grand one, considering the milestone number. Sadly, we had to compromise on a lot of things due to lack of funding. However, despite shortcomings, we arranged some giveaways for the participants that were appreciated by everyone.
Registration and refreshment:
The day started with registration at 10:00 AM. All participants got their giveaways and event IDs here before getting seated.
Tea/ coffee and some refreshments were served for all participants before we started the main program.
Introduction and discussion:
This session was conducted by Zoburaz Hossain, a pioneer member of Bangladesh Local Guides. All local guides introduced themselves in this session. This session was followed by some pioneer members presenting the story of Bangladesh Local Guidesâ 10 years journey.
Q&A:
The second session was for Q&A. Participant Local Guides asked their queries about Maps or Connect and the experienced Local Guides answered their questions, or tried to.
Brainstorming:
The third session was brainstorming. This interactive session was to bring out the ideas for the community. We made several groups, each consisting of five members. They discussed among themselves about different maps related problems in Bangladesh and came out with some ideas to share with the team.
Ex Regional Lead Experience share
Among our invited guests, we had 2 ex-regional leads, Mr. Hasan Shahed and Mr. Nasir Uddin Tipu, Google Maps Maker of Bangladesh maps editing. They shared their experience about how they updated information about Bangladesh on Google Maps. This inspired and encouraged the new members. It was a fruitful session.
Lunch and photo session:
Lunch was served after the morning session. After lunch we had a photo session where we had some fun taking pictures with drones.
Fun activities:
There were some fun activities arranged by the organizing team after the photo session. There were team building games and some old sports that we played as kids. It was a wonderful session, indeed.
Award session:
Bangladesh Local Guides always utilizes its inhouse resources. Starting from designing t-shirts or banners to any logistic support, our members always worked for all these all the time, without being paid for. We never had a chance to recognize them for their hard work previously. The volunteer members, who gave us their time and efforts in various events for the last five years or more, we recognized their hard work by awarding them crests. I also got a crest for hosting this milestone meetup.
Refreshments:
Before ending the long day we had another round of tea/ coffee along with more refreshments.
We also had an abundant supply of bottled drinking water and soda for the whole day to keep everyone hydrated.
Fundraising for logistic support:
We were expecting some local major sponsors for all our logistic support and was hoping to keep the contribution fee lower. But we could not manage the sponsors on time. Hence we had to compromise a lot of plans.Even though we thought of keeping the contribution fee at BDT 500, it finally was fixed at BDT 1,000 (less than $10)
Google Local Guides sponsored the t-shirts for this event.
The venue was sponsored by a well wisher. We only paid for the electricity and cleaning charge.
Our refreshments for the entire day, bottled water and soda were unconditionally sponsored by a local company.
Some personal donations for the event were also there to support basic logistics.
We cannot thank all these people and the Local Guides team enough for supporting us to organize this meetup.
I would like to share my gratitude towards all the team members as well for making this event a success.
A special thanks to @MahabubMunna , @Designer_Biswajit and @AbdusSattar for all their hard work and cooperation.
Here is a link of our media coverage on a leading local newspaper.
Images of all our activities and more can be found here. All photos posted here were taken by the members of Bangladesh Local Guides and used with their permission.
