About the Locale Maps project

The project all started as a simple spreadsheet the wife & I maintained to keep track of different congregations we’ve visited. There are some really helpful websites for congregational information, but none of them served my needs exactly. I was surprised that there are no websites that feature Google Maps to plot out different congregations. A Google Maps mashup would easily accomplish this, even with very minimal coding experience.

I built a crude—but operational—webpage with the map & showed it to my wife (fiancée at the time). She helped me input all the congregation data into the maps, helping this project grow rapidly. After convincing myself that my simple page would be good enough to share, I forwarded my page to a handful of friends for feedback. After continual refinement, I opened up my project to many through the Facebook fan page.

I’m trying to find ways to make this project grow. Thank you for being a part of this!

—Ian Sagabaen
South San Francisco, CA, USA
http://www.facebook.com/iansagabaen

There have been sites with themes like this one that have been requested to be taken down. Why are you still up & running?

Prior to releasing this site to the masses, I figured it would be wise to bring it up to the decision makers for permission & advice. In an email by our district authority, he mentions that at long as there are no identifiers that would attach this site to any group, we should be fine.

Likewise, I’m intentionally speaking nebulously to avoid using religious-related terminology that would attach this site to a specific church.

Can you provide addresses in the Philippines/other countries?

We get this question a lot from vacationers traveling abroad. Unfortunately, we don’t see this happening in the near future for a few reasons:

1. We can’t find up-to-date data for these locations &
2. Google Maps does not have any street data for these locations.

The rule of thumb is if Google Maps can’t properly map an address, it would be hard to do it on Locale Maps, since we’re using their technology. Google is making leaps & bounds in their map technology, so it’s not completely out of the question. Let’s hope for the best!

Can you add [this feature]?

Sure! Although site updates have been slow (it’s only being run by one person full-time), we’ve been listing to your suggestions & complaints & have noted them down. We take your suggestions & build them in our plans for future releases. Keep your feedback flowing & this site will eventually be built exactly as you like! Keep sending us your requests on our contact page & we’ll keep listening.

What can I do to help?

The best—& easiest—thing you can do: spread the word of Locale Maps! We are surviving on the input & updates from our fellow brethren who provide us with the most up-to-date & accurate information. In order of effectiveness, here’s what you can do to help:

1. Share localemaps.com with everyone who would benefit from this, & especially show them our Facebook fan wall. The more people who know about this, the more feedback we’ll receive better data!
2. Volunteer to be a regional map leader. If you know your surrounding locales well & would be a good contact person for the visiting vacationer or traveler, we can attach your email address to all of the related locales. Also, if there are temporary service changes, you’ll be reporting that news to us & we’ll add the temporary information to our maps.
3. Become a full-time data entry person! This project started out with one person copying address information from the back of the magazine onto Google Maps, so as you can imagine, it takes a lot of time. With more volunteered help, we’re sure that we can fill out our maps!

Interested? Send us a message & let’s talk!