In the era of Skype, Google+ Hangouts and instant communication, its so easy to lose sight of the value of a good-old fashioned ‘meetup.’ But a handful of loyal Wazers reminded us why these gatherings are so important over the weekend in Bratislava.
Organized by Tomas Gursky (aka guri211), country managers and area managers from Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Romania, and Austria gathered for an afternoon filled with presentations, Q&A, and discussion. The community leaders, including both Tomas and Hungarian Wazer Peter (wroadd), spoke about their respective communities and community-building in general, as well as about features and technical issues.
Tomas also spoke extensively about POI and address search and introduced a set of ideas on how to make POI search easy and intuitive for users.
Traveling from Waze HQ to attend the gathering were Waze Co-Founders Ehud Shabtai and Amir Shinar, as well as Head of Community and Support Chen Barsai and Community Manager Ori Dubnikov.
Ehud and Amir were in awe of the great level of engagement and involvement by the community of Wazers in attendance, and in their respective countries, and were glad to offer their insight on any/all issues the community sought to address.
In addition to improvements to our search mechanism (POI/landmarks), the group also requested improvements to ETA and routing issues, and in developing greater self management in different countries.
The afternoon included a presentation by Chen on Waze’s global map editing community, followed by a talk led by Ori on editor permissions and the future of self-management among map editors.
This followed a Q&A with Ehud, who answered a wide range of questions pertaining to everything from client and editor issues, bugs, feature requests and more.
Check out our full photo gallery of the event.
The full list of Wazers in attendance included: (HUNGARY) wroadd, ZseZo, Kaszast, Mochrul, Szata76, vtibi, Botika; (CZECH REPUBLIC) Zirland, Fotrik, Greby; (SLOVAKIA) guri211, porubcan, M-A-L , Shalafi, Suik,foxitrot, Glipko, grafik, Jozef Drahovsky, MagicOfLA, duky, SonkaW; (AUSTRIA) GPSRitter; and (ROMANIA) Spookyx.
Have you ever attended a meetup? Do you hope to organize or attend one in your region in the future?
